CODEWITHSUNDEEP
debugginglldb
m1cky22
m1cky22

Reputation: 208

Extract state from non-interactive LLDB session?

Is it possible to extract the current state of a C/C++ program using LLDB, without starting an interactive session? I've seen some information about the LLDB API but I haven't seen much info about how to use it, and if it can even accomplish what I'm looking for.

Ideally, I would write some code in Python or something, that is external the code I am debugging, where I use the LLDB API to get information about the current program, such as current variables and values, and can start and stop execution. Is this (or a subset of this) possible? Is there some alternative?

Here is some pseudocode for what I would like to do:

state = program.getState()
print state.values
program.next()
newState = state.set("newVariable", 10)
program.setState(newState)
program.continue()

Upvotes: 0

Views: 346

Answers (1)

Jim Ingham
Jim Ingham

Reputation: 27110

The Xcode debugger is implemented using lldb's API's. Xcode happens to offer an lldb command console as well, but all the UI commands are implemented using the public SB API's directly.

So it is certainly possible to do what you want.

Here's an example of driving a program with the SB API's:

https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/blob/master/lldb/examples/python/process_events.py

Here's an example of fetching all the global variables and their values:

https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/blob/master/lldb/examples/python/globals.py

There are a bunch of other examples in that directory that do parts of what you might be interested in. If there's anything (within reason) you want to do with the SB API's but can't find a way to do, please file a bug with http://bugs.llvm.org. The intent is that the SB API's provide a complete interface to LLDB, orthogonal to the command interpreter.

Of course, you can also use the command interpreter in non-interactive mode if you prefer (through the SBCommandInterpreter class), though I don't suggest that for programming the debugger since that ends up tying your code to the specifics of the output of the various lldb commands, and we don't guarantee that output as API...

Upvotes: 1

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