Invoke gdb to automatically pass arguments to the program being debugged

Question

I'd like to write a script that (under certain conditions) will execute gdb and automatically run some program X with some set of arguments Y. Once the program has finished executing the user should remain at gdb's prompt until s/he explicitly exits it.

One way to do this would be to have the script output the run command plus arguments Y to some file F and then have the script invoke gdb like this:

gdb X < F 

But is there a way to do this without introducing a temporary file?

Answer 1

The easiest way to do this given a program X and list of parameters a b c:

X a b c 

Is to use gdb's --args option, as follows:

gdb --args X a b c 

---

gdb --help has this to say about --args:

--args Arguments after executable-file are passed to inferior

Which means that the first argument after --args is the executable to debug, and all the arguments after that are passed as is to that executable.

Answer 2

If you want to run some commands through GDB and then have it exit or run to completion, just do

echo commands | gdb X 

If you want to leave it at the command prompt after running those commands, you can do

(echo commands; cat) | gdb X 

This results in echoing the commands to GDB, and then you type into the cat process, which copies its stdin to stdout, which is piped into GDB.