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priorit

Member

Registered: 2008-12-23

Posts: 21

pretty printing of STL containers in gdb

My gdb doesn't pretty print STL containers. Does anyone know how to enable that feature?

From what I could find the pretty printers should be listed with 'info pretty-printers'. I only seem to have one for mpx_boud128:

(gdb) info pretty-printer 
global pretty-printers:
  builtin
    mpx_bound128

It seems like like the pretty printers are located in the '/usr/share/gdb/auto-load/usr/lib' directory, and I do have some files there:

ᐅ ls -l /usr/share/gdb/auto-load/usr/lib/
total 20
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  197 Sep 11 22:40 libglib-2.0.so.0.7800.0-gdb.py
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  200 Sep 11 22:40 libgobject-2.0.so.0.7800.0-gdb.py
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  201 Sep 21 14:32 libgstreamer-1.0.so.0.2206.0-gdb.py
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2891 Apr  3  2023 libisl.so.23.3.0-gdb.py
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2384 Aug  2 09:06 libstdc++.so.6.0.32-gdb.py

Specifically, the 'libstdc++' one is provided by gcc.

Looking at the configuration of gdb, this folder should be automatically loaded ('--with-auto-load-dir'):

ᐅ gdb --configuration 
This GDB was configured as follows:
   configure --host=x86_64-pc-linux-gnu --target=x86_64-pc-linux-gnu
             --with-auto-load-dir=$debugdir:$datadir/auto-load
             --with-auto-load-safe-path=$debugdir:$datadir/auto-load
             --with-expat
             --with-gdb-datadir=/usr/share/gdb (relocatable)
             --with-jit-reader-dir=/usr/lib/gdb (relocatable)
             --without-libunwind-ia64
             --with-lzma
             --without-babeltrace
             --without-intel-pt
             --with-mpfr
             --without-xxhash
             --with-python=/usr (relocatable)
             --with-python-libdir=/usr/lib (relocatable)
             --with-debuginfod
             --with-guile
             --enable-source-highlight
             --enable-threading
             --with-separate-debug-dir=/usr/lib/debug (relocatable)
             --with-system-gdbinit=/etc/gdb/gdbinit

("Relocatable" means the directory can be moved with the GDB installation
tree, and GDB will still find it.)

Looking the 'strace' of a gdb run I can see that it tries to readlink the 'auto-load' directory, but then doesn't open any files in it:

readlink("/usr/share", 0x7ffeb4f9a340, 1023) = -1 EINVAL (Invalid argument)
readlink("/usr/share/gdb", 0x7ffeb4f9a340, 1023) = -1 EINVAL (Invalid argument)
readlink("/usr/share/gdb/auto-load", 0x7ffeb4f9a340, 1023) = -1 EINVAL (Invalid argument)
newfstatat(3, "", {st_mode=S_IFIFO|0600, st_size=0, ...}, AT_EMPTY_PATH) = 0
--- SIGCHLD {si_signo=SIGCHLD, si_code=CLD_EXITED, si_pid=3828926, si_uid=1000, si_status=0, si_utime=0, si_stime=0} ---

I also tried to 'load' the python file, but that fails with "You can't do that when your target is " followed by `exec' or `None' (depending on whether I started gdb with an executable or not).

(gdb) load /usr/share/gdb/auto-load/usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6.0.32-gdb.py 
You can't do that when your target is `exec'

Any suggestions?

mezkov

Member

Registered: 2010-01-09

Posts: 13

Re: pretty printing of STL containers in gdb

I just struggled with pretty printing too. And I figured out my problem was in my ~/.gdbinit, where I modified the safe path using command

set auto-load safe-path /foo/bar

and the pretty printers didn't have permission to run. But your problem may be on different place.

It works like this. GDB tries to auto-load some scripts for every object file the program needs (i.e. the executable file and all shared libraries). When your program loads shared library /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6.0.32, it should try to load script /usr/share/gdb/auto-load/usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6.0.32-gdb.py, which setups pretty printing for STL containers. The actual pretty printers are stored in /usr/share/gcc-12.2.1/python/libstdcxx/. But it depends on configuration of gdb.

It searches for the scripts in auto-load script-directory. Path to this directory can be seen by running this command in gdb terminal:

(gdb) show auto-load scripts-directory
List of directories from which to load auto-loaded scripts is $debugdir:$datadir/auto-load.

The default value contain two paths: $debugdir (usually evaluated to /usr/lib/debug) and $datadir/auto-load (usually evaluated to /usr/share/gdb/auto-load). Value of $datadir can be seen by

(gdb) show data-dir
GDB's data directory is "/usr/share/gdb".

But it also needs to verify, if it is permitted to run the script. This is defined by option auto-load safe-path:

(gdb) show auto-load safe-path 
List of directories from which it is safe to auto-load files is $debugdir:$datadir/auto-load.

As you can see, there is also the $datadir/auto-load.

You can debug the auto-loading by running this command in the gdb console before you run your program:

(gdb) set debug auto-load