Debugging with GDB Manual The GNU Source-Level Debugger (769148-001, March 2014)

When this message is printed, you need to disable or remove some of the hardware-assisted
breakpoints and watchpoints, and then continue.
Continuing and stepping
Continuing means resuming program execution until your program completes normally. In contrast,
stepping means executing just one more “step” of your program, where “step” may mean either
one line of source code, or one machine instruction (depending on what particular command you
use). Either when continuing or when stepping, your program may stop even sooner, due to a
breakpoint or a signal. (If it stops due to a signal, you may want to use handle, or use 'signal
0' to resume execution. See “Signals” (page 47).)
continue [ignore-count], c
[ignore-count], fg
[ignore-count]
Resume program execution, at the address where your
program last stopped; any breakpoints set at that address
are bypassed. The optional argument ignore-count allows
you to specify a further number of times to ignore a breakpoint
at this location; its effect is like that of ignore (see “Break
conditions” (page 41)).
The argument ignore-count is meaningful only when your
program stopped due to a breakpoint. At other times, the
argument to continue is ignored.
The synonyms c and fg (for foreground, as the debugged
program is deemed to be the foreground program) are
provided purely for convenience, and have exactly the same
behavior as continue.
To resume execution at a different place, you can use return (see “Returning from a function”
(page 86)) to go back to the calling function; or jump (see “Continuing at a different address”
(page 85)) to go to an arbitrary location in your program.
A typical technique for using stepping is to set a breakpoint (see “Breakpoints” (page 36)) at the
beginning of the function or the section of your program where a problem is believed to lie, run
your program until it stops at that breakpoint, and then step through the suspect area, examining
the variables that are interesting, until you see the problem happen.
step Continue running your program until control reaches a different source line,
then stop it and return control to GDB. This command is abbreviated s.
WARNING! If you use the step command while control is within a
function that was compiled without debugging information, execution
proceeds until control reaches a function that does have debugging
information. Likewise, it will not step into a function which is compiled
without debugging information. To step through functions without
debugging information, use the stepi command, described below.
The step command only stops at the first instruction of a source line. This
prevents the multiple stops that could otherwise occur in switch statements,
for loops, and so on. step continues to stop if a function that has
debugging information is called within the line. In other words, step steps
inside any functions called within the line.
Also, the step command only enters a function if there is line number
information for the function. Otherwise it acts like the next command. This
avoids problems when using cc -gl on MIPS machines. Previously, step
entered subroutines if there was any debugging information about the
routine.
Continuing and stepping 45