MinGW gdb ignoring breakpoints when used with Eclipse CDT

Question

I'm trying to set up a Windows 7 machine with Eclipse CDT (Kepler) and MinGW. Here follow the steps I perfomed:

1. I downloaded and installed MinGW from the official repository
2. I downloaded and installed the latest (Kepler) Eclipse CDT from the official website
3. I updated the PATH global variable so as to include the MinGW bin path C:\MinGW\bin. The PATH variable is also correctly set in the Environment section in Eclipse.

However, when I try to debug (in debug mode) a simple Hello World program, breakpoints are ignored and the execution continues until the end. I tried the following workarounds without success:

• adding the following linker flags: -static-libgcc -static-libstdc++
• manually specifying the binary parser (PE Windows Parser)
• change the preferred launcher to Standard: create process launcher
• adding the following lines at the beginning of the main function: setvbuf(stdout, NULL, _IONBF, 0); setvbuf(stderr, NULL, _IONBF, 0);

Any suggestion? thanks.

Answer 1

For me, the problem was that my program's console output messed up gdb's console output, which is parsed by Eclipse.

The solution was to tell gdb to allocate a new console for the program output, by adding "set new-console on" to your .gdbinit file (Make also sure the .gdbinit file is specified under "Debugger options" in Eclipse).

There's also a discussion about this here: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=327766