mjhjmtu

I am making a nice presentation of ARM assembly code execution and I would need GDB to step the code every 1 second infinitely long (well until I press CTRL+C). Has anyone got solution?

I don't want to keep on standing next to the keyboard and stepping the program when visitors come visit my stall.

Gdb's CLI supports a while loop. There's no builtin sleep command, but you can either call out to the shell to run the sleep program, or use gdb's builtin python interpreter, if it has one. It's interruptible with Control-C.

Method 1:

(gdb) while (1)
 >step
 >shell sleep 1
 >end

Method 2:

(gdb) python import time
(gdb) while (1)
 >step
 >python time.sleep(1)
 >end

Method 3 (define a macro):

(gdb) define runslowly
Type commands for definition of "runslowly".
End with a line saying just "end".
>python import time
>while (1)
 >step
 >python time.sleep(1)
 >end
>end
(gdb) document runslowly
Type documentation for "runslowly".
End with a line saying just "end".
>step a line at a time, every 1 second
>end

(gdb) runslowly

expect can automate this

#!/usr/bin/env expect
spawn -noecho gdb -q ls
expect -ex (gdb)
send -- "break mainr"
expect -ex (gdb)
send -- "runr"
while 1 
 expect -ex (gdb)
 send -- "sr"
 sleep 1

or if there's a risk of the program running out of s you can repeatedly gdb it with a little more complication

#!/usr/bin/env expect

while 1 
 spawn -noecho gdb -q ls
 expect -ex (gdb)
 send -- "break mainr"
 expect -ex (gdb)
 send -- "runr"
 expect 
 -ex The program is not being run 
 eof 
 -ex (gdb) 
 send -- "sr"
 sleep 1
 exp_continue
 
 

You could have the shell pipe in commands; here's the idea:

while :; do echo step; sleep 1; done | gdb arm-program

gdb reads the commands from the pipe; it sees a "step" command every second ad infinitum.

You may want to set up some break-points and run the program; adjust to taste:

(echo br 1; echo run; while :; do echo step; sleep 1; done ) | gdb arm-program