How to let GDB continue until the program enters another function?

Question

Say I am in A() and A() calls B(). I just entered A() and I want the program to run until I am in B(). It doesn't have to be a specific function B(). I just want my program to pause whenever it enters a new function. Is there a way to do that?

Answer 1

For calls, as mentioned at: List of all function calls made in an application :

set confirm off
rbreak .

rbreak sets a breakpoint for every function that matches a given regular expression, . matches all functions.

This command might take a while to run for a large executable with lots of functions. But once it finishes, runtime will be efficient.

The exit is trickier, since we can't know at compile time where we will land: How to set a breakpoint in GDB where the function returns?

At How to break on instruction with a specific opcode in GDB? I also provided a script that single steps until a desired instruction is found, which you could use to find callq. That one has the advantage of not making you wait on a large executable, but execution will be very slow, so the target can't be very far away.