How can I make GDB print a string literally (without escaping)?

Question

I have a big, long string that I want to capture to a file. I can use logging to get most of the way there:

set logging on
set logging file gdb.log

…but if I use p or x/s to print the string, quotes and junk are all escaped. How can I get the string as-is?

Answer 1

For a really large string you can also use:

(gdb) set variable $s = MY_STRING
(gdb) dump binary memory FILE $s $s + (size_t)strlen($s)

which can be easily adapted to handle buffers with null bytes. Also the content of FILE would never contain anything other than the string.

Answer 2

Ah, I totally forgot about printf:

printf "%s\n", some_string