CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pathgdbargv
soandos
soandos

Reputation: 5146

Launch application in gdb with non-path name

I am trying to launch a legacy application in GDB, and it requires that it's argv[0] value not contain anything other than alphanumeric characters.

Whenever I launch the program in GDB it seems that it expands the name to be the full path before running the program, so I get an error like (because it can't deal with the slashes):

"Cannot find /home/user/myapp ..."

Is it possible to run a program in GDB with a relative path, so that it will just see "myapp"?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1672

Answers (1)

Mark Plotnick
Mark Plotnick

Reputation: 10271

Gdb normally runs target commands using the shell command line

    exec program_pathname program_arguments

But it has a set exec-wrapper command that will change this to

    exec exec_wrapper program_pathname program_arguments

The exec_wrapper is often another command, but it can be an option that the exec command accepts.

Many shells (bash, zsh, ksh93) support a -a option to the exec command to set argv[0].

So, if your shell supports exec -a, you can do the following to invoke /home/user/myapp with argv[0]==myapp:

(gdb) set exec-wrapper -a myapp

Upvotes: 2

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