• Enabled once. The breakpoint stops your program, but then becomes disabled.
• Enabled for deletion. The breakpoint stops your program, but immediately after
it does so it is deleted permanently. A breakpoint set with the tbreak command
starts out in this state.
You can use the following commands to enable or disable breakpoints, watchpoints,
and catchpoints:
disable [breakpoints]
[range...]
Disable the specified breakpoints―or all
breakpoints, if none are listed. A disabled
breakpoint has no effect but is not forgotten. All
options such as ignore-counts, conditions, and
commands are remembered in case the
breakpoint is enabled again later. You may
abbreviate disable as dis.
enable [breakpoints]
[range...]
Enable the specified breakpoints (or all defined
breakpoints). They become effective once again
in stopping your program.
enable [breakpoints] once
range...
Enable the specified breakpoints temporarily.
GDB disables any of these breakpoints
immediately after stopping your program.
enable [breakpoints] delete
range...
Enable the specified breakpoints to work once,
then die. GDB deletes any of these breakpoints
as soon as your program stops there.
Except for a breakpoint set with tbreak (see “Setting breakpoints” (page 52)),
breakpoints that you set are initially enabled; subsequently, they become disabled or
enabled only when you use one of the commands above. (The command until can
set and delete a breakpoint of its own, but it does not change the state of your other
breakpoints; see “Continuing and stepping” (page 64).)
5.1.5 Break conditions
The simplest sort of breakpoint breaks every time your program reaches a specified
place. You can also specify a condition for a breakpoint. A condition is just a Boolean
expression in your programming language (see “Expressions” (page 83)). A breakpoint
with a condition evaluates the expression each time your program reaches it, and your
program stops only if the condition is true.
This is the converse of using assertions for program validation; in that situation, you
want to stop when the assertion is violated―that is, when the condition is false. In C,
if you want to test an assertion expressed by the condition assert, you should set the
condition '! assert' on the appropriate breakpoint.
Conditions are also accepted for watchpoints; you may not need them, since a
watchpoint is inspecting the value of an expression anyhow―but it might be simpler,
5.1 Breakpoints 59