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The Art of Debugging with GDB, DDD, and Eclipse
book

The Art of Debugging with GDB, DDD, and Eclipse

by Norman Matloff, Peter Jay Salzman
September 2008
Intermediate to advanced
280 pages
6h 31m
English
No Starch Press
Content preview from The Art of Debugging with GDB, DDD, and Eclipse

Watchpoints

A watchpoint is a special kind of breakpoint which, like a normal breakpoint, is an instruction that tells GDB to pause execution of your program. The difference is that watchpoints don't "live" at a line of source code. Instead, a watchpoint is an instruction that tells GDB to pause execution whenever an expression changes value.[11] That expression can be quite simple, like the name of a variable:

(gdb) watch i

which will make GDB pause whenever i changes value. The expression can also be quite complex:

(gdb) watch (i | j > 12) && i > 24 && strlen(name) > 6

You can think of a watchpoint as being "attached" to an expression; when the value of that expression changes, GDB will pause the program's execution.

Although watchpoints ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781593271749Errata Page