Debugging with GDB Manual (5900-1473; WDB 6.2; January 2011)

you are debugging is called '/tmp/fred', the mapped
symbol file is '/tmp/fred.syms'. Future GDB
debugging sessions notice the presence of this file, and
can quickly map in symbol information from it, rather
than reading the symbol table from the executable
program.
The '.syms' file is specific to the host machine where
GDB is run. It holds an exact image of the internal GDB
symbol table. It cannot be shared across multiple host
platforms.
-r, -readnow Read each symbol file's entire symbol table immediately,
rather than the default, which is to read it incrementally
as it is needed. This makes startup slower, but makes
future operations faster.
You typically combine the -mapped and -readnow options in order to build a '.syms'
file that contains complete symbol information. (See “Commands to specify files”
(page 118), for information on '.syms' files.) A simple GDB invocation to do nothing but
build a '.syms' file for future use is:
gdb -batch -nx -mapped -readnow programname
2.1.2 Choosing modes
You can run GDB in various alternative modes―for example, in batch mode or quiet
mode.
-nx, -n Do not execute commands found in any initialization files
(normally called '.gdbinit', or 'gdb.ini' on PCs).
Normally, GDB executes the commands in these files after
all the command options and arguments have been
processed. See “Command files” (page 291).
-quiet, -silent, -q “Quiet”. Do not print the introductory and copyright
messages. These messages are also suppressed in batch
mode.
-batch Run in batch mode. Exit with status 0 after processing all
the command files specified with '-x' (and all commands
from initialization files, if not inhibited with '-n'). Exit with
nonzero status if an error occurs in executing the GDB
commands in the command files.
Batch mode may be useful for running GDB as a filter,
for example to download and run a program on another
computer; in order to make this more useful, the message
Program exited normally.
2.1 Invoking GDB 25