using gdb to debug a interactive program that reads input from stdin

Question

I'm writing a client/server program in C.

My client has a thread reading input from stdin, it's just a while(1) loop to read input from stdin. Whenever it reads a line, it deliver it to another thread that handles message parsing and framing.

As I enter gdb, the command line is occupied by gdb prompt and I can no longer input lines into stdin.

Is there a way to do it? (I don't want to redirect stdin to an input file because I've tried this method and it didn't work)

Answer 1

Run your program in one terminal and attach to it from gdb in another terminal.

To attach to a running program, find the process ID (PID) of the program you want to attach to, then execute gdb <executable> <PID>.