Edit (Debugging with GDB)
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9.3 Editing Source Files
To edit the lines in a source file, use the edit
command. The editing program of your choice is invoked with the current line set to the active line in the program. Alternatively, there are several ways to specify what part of the file you want to print if you want to see other parts of the program:
edit location
- Edit the source file specified by
location
. Editing starts at thatlocation
, e.g., at the specified source line of the specified file. See Specify Location, for all the possible forms of thelocation
argument; here are the forms of theedit
command most commonly used:
edit number
- Edit the current source file with
number
as the active line number. edit function
- Edit the file containing
function
at the beginning of its definition.
9.3.1 Choosing your Editor
You can customize GDB to use any editor you want 10. By default, it is /bin/ex
, but you can change this by setting the environment variable EDITOR
before using GDB. For example, to configure GDB to use the vi
editor, you could use these commands with the sh
shell:
EDITOR=/usr/bin/vi export EDITOR gdb …
or in the csh
shell,
setenv EDITOR /usr/bin/vi gdb …
Footnotes
(10)
The only restriction is that your editor (say ex
), recognizes the following command-line syntax:
ex +number file
The optional numeric value +number
specifies the number of the line in the file where to start editing.