passing a command to gdb when running a program - gdb

I am using gdb to debug a program, and I want to have the output of the command
$(perl -e 'print "A"x20')
as my argument. How can I do that? This way the argument would be very flexible.

You can use the run command and pass it any parameters afterwards which will be arguments.
If you want the above, try:
run `$(perl -e 'print "A"x20')`
as a command once you start gdb.

The above is slightly off and wouldn't work for me either. If you use the set args command, the following will work (at least on my system):
set args "`perl -e 'print "A"x20;'`"
As usual, simply type 'run' after to start debugging, and the proper argument should be passed.

It looks like you didn't start your program with gdb properly. Supposing your program is "a.out", in bash:
$gdb a.out
(gdb)run `$(perl -e 'print "A"x20')`
Hope this helps you.

Related

Unable to use sed command in Windows Command Prompt due to 'unterminated address regex'

I'm trying to run a sed command on a Windows machine from the command prompt (CMD.exe) but I am struggling to understand the regular expression and how to escape the string properly when running on Windows. Ideally, I want to develop a solution that works across UNIX and Windows.
sed is not available on Windows so I have installed it via the gnuWin32 project which works well.
The unix format for the command is:
sed -i '' -e 's/\\/_next/\\.\\/next/g' out/**.html
Through a process of trial an error I have managed to get this far:
sed -i \'\' -e \'s/\\/_next/\\.\\/next/g\' out/**.html
but I get an error:
sed: -e expression #1, char 27: unterminated address regex
So there's definitely something wrong with my regex, probably the escaping of various parts?
Any ideas how I might go about fixing this?
Update:
I'm getting the code from here where unfortunately only Linux and OSX are covered.
You need to use
sed -i "s/\\/_next/\\.\\/next/g" out/**.html
The Windows GNU sed does not require the '' empty argument after -i option, they can be safely removed.
Also, the sed command in Windows console should be used in double quotes.

/bin/sh: 1: Syntax error: "(" unexpected after running Makefile [duplicate]

I often find Bash syntax very helpful, e.g. process substitution like in diff <(sort file1) <(sort file2).
Is it possible to use such Bash commands in a Makefile? I'm thinking of something like this:
file-differences:
diff <(sort file1) <(sort file2) > $#
In my GNU Make 3.80 this will give an error since it uses the shell instead of bash to execute the commands.
From the GNU Make documentation,
5.3.2 Choosing the Shell
------------------------
The program used as the shell is taken from the variable `SHELL'. If
this variable is not set in your makefile, the program `/bin/sh' is
used as the shell.
So put SHELL := /bin/bash at the top of your makefile, and you should be good to go.
BTW: You can also do this for one target, at least for GNU Make. Each target can have its own variable assignments, like this:
all: a b
a:
#echo "a is $$0"
b: SHELL:=/bin/bash # HERE: this is setting the shell for b only
b:
#echo "b is $$0"
That'll print:
a is /bin/sh
b is /bin/bash
See "Target-specific Variable Values" in the documentation for more details. That line can go anywhere in the Makefile, it doesn't have to be immediately before the target.
You can call bash directly, use the -c flag:
bash -c "diff <(sort file1) <(sort file2) > $#"
Of course, you may not be able to redirect to the variable $#, but when I tried to do this, I got -bash: $#: ambiguous redirect as an error message, so you may want to look into that before you get too into this (though I'm using bash 3.2.something, so maybe yours works differently).
One way that also works is putting it this way in the first line of the your target:
your-target: $(eval SHELL:=/bin/bash)
#echo "here shell is $$0"
If portability is important you may not want to depend on a specific shell in your Makefile. Not all environments have bash available.
You can call bash directly within your Makefile instead of using the default shell:
bash -c "ls -al"
instead of:
ls -al
There is a way to do this without explicitly setting your SHELL variable to point to bash. This can be useful if you have many makefiles since SHELL isn't inherited by subsequent makefiles or taken from the environment. You also need to be sure that anyone who compiles your code configures their system this way.
If you run sudo dpkg-reconfigure dash and answer 'no' to the prompt, your system will not use dash as the default shell. It will then point to bash (at least in Ubuntu). Note that using dash as your system shell is a bit more efficient though.
It's not a direct answer to the question, makeit is limited Makefile replacement with bash syntax and it can be useful in some cases (I'm the author)
rules can be defined as bash-functions
auto-completion feature
Basic idea is to have while loop in the end of the script:
while [ $# != 0 ]; do
if [ "$(type -t $1)" == 'function' ]; then
$1
else
exit 1
fi
shift
done
https://asciinema.org/a/435159

What shell does std::system use?

TL;DR; I guess the shell that std::system use, is sh. But, I'm not sure.
I tried to print the shell, using this code: std::system("echo $SHELL"), and the output was /bin/bash. It was weird for me. So, I wanted to see, what happens if I do that in sh? And, the same output: /bin/bash. Also, if I use a command like SHELL="/usr/bin/something", to set the SHELL variable to another string, it will print the new string that I set to it (/usr/bin/something), and it looks it's not a good way to see what shell it's using. Then, I tried to check it, using the ps command, and the output was: bash, a.out, ps. It was weird to see bash in this list. So, I created a custom shell, and change the shell in gnome-terminal to it:
#include <iostream>
int main()
{
std::string input;
while (true)
{
std::string command;
std::getline(std::cin, command);
std::system(command.c_str());
}
}
Now, it's easier to test, and I think, the results is better.
Then, I tried to test the ps command again, but in the custom shell, and the results was: test_shell, ps.
It was weird again. How the shell isn't sh, nor bash? And, the final test I did was: echo $0. And, the results was sh, in both custom shell, and normal program.
Edit
It seems like /bin/sh is linked to /bin/bash (ll /bin/sh command's output is /bin/sh -> bash), and actually, it seems like the only difference between sh and bash is filename, and the files's contents are the same. I checked the difference between these files with diff command too:
$ xxd /bin/sh > sh
$ xxd /bin/bash > bash
$ diff sh bash
(+ Yes, $SHELL doesn't means the running shell (I didn't know that when I was testing, and I just wanted to see what happens))
The GNU sources (https://github.com/lattera/glibc/blob/master/sysdeps/posix/system.c) say
/bin/sh
So, whatever /bin/sh is hardlinked to is the shell invoked by std::system() on Linux.
(This is correct, as /bin/sh is expected to be linked to a sane shell capable of doing things with the system.)
According to cppreference.com, std::system
calls the host environment's command processor (e.g. /bin/sh, cmd.exe, command.com)
This means the shell used will depend on the operating system.
On any POSIX OS (including Linux), the shell used by std::system is /bin/sh. (Though as the OP points out, /bin/sh could be a symlink to another shell.)
As for the SHELL environment variable, as has been pointed out in the comments, this environment variable cannot be used to reliably identify the running shell program. SHELL is defined by POSIX to
represent a pathname of the user's preferred command language interpreter
(source)

awk returns "The specified path is invalid" error on cmder windows

I'm trying this awk oneliner from here on cmder-Windows10:
awk '/> \\box.=/,/^$/{print}'
to examine a log file. but I get this error:
The specified path is invalid.
I know the basics of regular expressions but I can't understand what the above command is supposed to do. I would appreciate if you could help me with:
elaborate the above command and what it is supposed to return? If I realise that maybe I can replicate it with some native Windows command outside the cmder. probably using findstr?
why am I getting that error? and if/how I can edit the command to resolve the issue?
P.S. thanks to this post I was able to run the command awk '/box.=/,/^\r\n/' foo and it works without any error returning what it is expected to return. but I still don't know why the original command returns that error.
Demonstrating what your command does:
$ cat foo
nope
> \box.=
this
and this
nope
Your script executed:
$ awk '/> \\box.=/,/^$/' foo
> \box.=
this
and this
# this is the empty line
If you are running it in Windows /^$/ might not work since Windows uses \r\n newlines. Instead, try:
$ awk -v RS="\r\n" '/> \\box.=/,/^$/'` file

Use GDB to debug a C++ program called from a shell script

I have a extremely complicated shell script, within which it calls a C++ program I want to debug via GDB. It is extremely hard to separate this c++ program from the shell since it has a lot of branches and a lot of environmental variables setting.
Is there a way to invoke GDB on this shell script? Looks like gdb requires me to call on a C++ program directly.
In addition to options mentioned by #diverscuba23, you could do the following:
gdb --args bash <script>
(assuming it's a bash script. Else adapt accordingly)
There are two options that you can do:
Invoke GDB directly within the shell script. This would imply that you don't have standard in and standard out redirected.
Run the shell script and then attach the debugger to the already running C++ process like so: gdb progname 1234 where 1234 is the process ID of the running C++ process.
If you need to do things before the program starts running then option 1 would be the better choice, otherwise option 2 is the cleaner way.
Modify the c++ application to print its pid and sleep 30 seconds (perhaps based on environment or an argument). Attach to the running instance with gdb.
I would probably modify the script to always call gdb (and revert this later) or add an option to call gdb. This will almost always be the easiest solution.
The next easiest would be to temporarily move your executable and replace it with a shell script that runs gdb on the moved program. For example, in the directory containing your program:
$ mv program _program
$ (echo "#!/bin/sh"; echo "exec gdb $PWD/_program") > program
$ chmod +x program
Could you just temporarily add gdb to your script?
Although the answers given are valid, sometimes you don't have permissions to change the script to execute gdb or to modify the program to add additional output to attach through pid.
Luckily, there is yet another way through the power of bash
Use ps, grep and awk to pick-out the pid for you after its been executed. You can do this by either wrapping the other script with your own or by just executing a command yourself.
That command might look something like this:
process.sh
#!/usr/bin/env bash
#setup for this example
#this will execute vim (with cmdline options) as a child to bash
#we will attempt to attach to this process
vim ~/.vimrc
To get gdb to attach, we'd just need to execute the following:
gdb --pid $(ps -ef | grep -ve grep | grep vim | awk '{print $2}')
I use ps -ef here to list the processes and their arguments. Sometimes, you'll have multiple instances of a program running and need to further grep down to the one you want
the grep -ve grep is there because the f option to ps will include the next grep in its list. If you don't need the command arguments for additional filtering, don't include the -f option for ps and ignore this piece
grep vim is where we're finding our desired process. If you needed more filtering, you could just do something like grep -E "vim.*vimrc" and filter down to exactly the process that you're trying to attach to
awk '{print $2}' simply outputs just the process' pid to stdout. Use $1 if you're using ps -e instead of ps -ef
My normal setup is to run such script that starts my process in 1 tmux pane and having typed something similar to the above in a bottom pane. That way if I need to adjust the filtering (for whatever reason), I can do it pretty quickly.
Usually though, it will be the same for a specific instance and I want to just attach automatically after its been started. I'll do the following instead:
runGdb.py
#!/usr/bin/env bash
./process.sh &
PID=$(ps -ef | grep -ve grep | grep -E "vim.*vimrc" | awk '{print $2}')
#or
#PID=$(ps -e | grep vim | awk '{print $1}')
gdb --pid $PID
This assumes that the original process can be safely run in the background.