c - Make GDB print control flow of functions as they are called

Question

How do I make gdb print functions of interest as they are called, indented according to how deep in the stack they are?

I want to be able to say something like (made up):

(gdb) trace Foo* Bar* printf

And have gdb print all functions which begin with Foo or Bar, as they are called. Kind of like gnu cflow, except using the debugging symbols and only printing functions which actually get called, not all possible call flows.

Tools which won't help include cachegrind, callgrind and oprofile, which order the results by which functions were called most often. I need the order of calling preserved.

The wildcarding (or equivalent) is essential, as there are a lot of Foo and Bar funcs. Although I would settle for recording absolutely every function. Or, perhaps telling gdb to record all functions in a particular library.

Some GDB wizard must have a script for this common job!

Answer 1

In your case I would turn to the define command in gdb, which allows you to define a function, which can take up to 10 arguments.

You can pass in the names of functions to "trace" as arguments to the function you define, or record them all in the function itself. I'd do something like the following

define functiontrace
if $arg0
    break $arg0
    commands
        where
        continue
        end
    end

if $arg1
...

Arguments to a user-defined function in gdb are referenced as $arg0-$arg9. Alternatively, you could just record every function you wanted to trace in the function, instead of using $arg0-9.

Note: this will not indent as to depth in the stack trace, but will print the stack trace every time the function is called. I find this approach more useful than strace etc... because it will log any function you want, system, library, local, or otherwise.