Run GDB repeatedly on an executable file (and halt on crashes/errors)

Question

I am trying to figure out a way to run an executable with GDB repeatedly and preferably halt on errors.

I could not find a way to do this in the manual!

Thanks

Answer 1

I tried (in Bash):

while true ; do gdb -ex run a.out -ex quit ; done ;

Unfortunately, this turned out to be rather tricky to kill off, but it did automate running, and when the program crashed (I tested with an old program that causes a SIGABRT), gdb asks "The program is running. Exit anyway? (y or n)", so just hit n.

Answer 2

I ran into this same problem, and came up with what I think is a fairly nice way of stopping the infinite loop that BoBTFish suggested.

Instead of looping while true, you can use the existence of a dummy file to control the loop, e.g:

touch loopfile; while [ -f loopfile ] ; do gdb -ex run a.out -ex quit ; done ;

When you want to stop your infinite debugging session, you can either open a new terminal in the same directory and rm loopfile, or you can exit from the same terminal by interrupting with control-c and then deleting loopfile from within gdb:

^CQuit
A debugging session is active.

    Inferior 1 [process 11136] will be killed.

Quit anyway? (y or n) n
Not confirmed.
(gdb) shell rm loopfile 
(gdb) quit
A debugging session is active.

    Inferior 1 [process 11136] will be killed.

Quit anyway? (y or n) y

Hopefully this is useful to someone in the future, it seems like a nice (if hackish) way of debugging intermittent problems.