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20 GDB Annotations
This chapter describes annotations in GDB. Annotations are designed to interface GDB
to graphical user interfaces or other similar programs which want to interact with GDB
at a relatively high level.
20.1 What is an annotation?
To produce annotations, start GDB with the --annotate=2 option.
Annotations start with a newline character, two control-z characters, and the name
of the annotation. If there is no additional information associated with this annotation,
the name of the annotation is followed immediately by a newline. If there is additional
information, the name of the annotation is followed by a space, the additional
information, and a newline. The additional information cannot contain newline
characters.
Any output not beginning with a newline and two control-z characters denotes
literal output from GDB. Currently there is no need for GDB to output a newline
followed by two control-z characters, but if there was such a need, the annotations
could be extended with an `escape' annotation which means those three characters as
output.
A simple example of starting up GDB with annotations is:
$ gdb --annotate=2
GNU GDB 5.0
Copyright 2000 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
GDB is free software, covered by the GNU General Public License,
and you are welcome to change it and/or distribute copies of it
under certain conditions.
Type "show copying" to see the conditions.
There is absolutely no warranty for GDB. Type "show warranty"
for details.
This GDB was configured as "sparc-sun-sunos4.1.3"
^Z^Zpre-prompt
(gdb)
^Z^Zprompt
quit
^Z^Zpost-prompt
$
Here quit is input to GDB; the rest is output from GDB. The three lines beginning
`^Z^Z' (where `^Z' denotes a control-z character) are annotations; the rest is output
from GDB.
20.2 The server prefix
To issue a command to GDB without affecting certain aspects of the state which is seen
by users, prefix it with server. This means that this command will not affect the
20.1 What is an annotation? 297