Spurious commands being executed in the binary

[surmish]

Describe the bug
In the command prompt of the tool I am debugging (it uses a csh shell as its prompt), every time I run any command, some extra gdb related commands are executed along with it.

Screenshots

tool_prompt> Error: unknown command '1-thread-info'
tool_prompt> Error: unknown command '1-stack-list-variables'
tool_prompt> Error: unknown command '1-var-update'
tool_prompt> Error: unknown command '1-data-list-register-values'
tool_prompt> Error: unknown option '-break-list'

Please complete the following information:

• OS: 2.6.32-754.11.1.el6.x86_64 Linux
• gdbgui version: 0.13.2.0
• gdb version: 8.3
• browser: firefox 60.5.1
• python packages:
  alabaster==0.7.12
  argcomplete==1.10.0
  attrs==19.1.0
  Babel==2.7.0
  certifi==2019.6.16
  chardet==3.0.4
  Click==7.0
  distro==1.4.0
  docutils==0.15.1
  docwriter==1.1.1
  Flask==0.12.4
  Flask-Compress==1.4.0
  Flask-SocketIO==2.9.6
  gdbgui==0.13.2.0
  gevent==1.4.0
  greenlet==0.4.15
  idna==2.8
  imagesize==1.1.0
  itsdangerous==1.1.0
  Jinja2==2.10.1
  livereload==2.6.1
  Markdown==3.1.1
  MarkupSafe==1.1.1
  meson==0.50.1
  mistune==0.8.4
  mkdocs==1.0.4
  mkdocs-material==4.0.2
  msgpack==0.6.1
  ninja==1.9.0
  packaging==19.1
  pycscope==1.2.1
  pygdbmi==0.9.0.2
  Pygments==2.3.1
  pymdown-extensions==6.0
  pynvim==0.3.2
  pyparsing==2.4.2
  python-engineio==3.9.3
  python-socketio==4.3.1
  pytz==2019.2
  PyYAML==5.1
  requests==2.22.0
  six==1.12.0
  snowballstemmer==1.9.1
  Sphinx==3.0.0.dev20190906
  sphinxcontrib-applehelp==1.0.1
  sphinxcontrib-devhelp==1.0.1
  sphinxcontrib-htmlhelp==1.0.2
  sphinxcontrib-jsmath==1.0.1
  sphinxcontrib-qthelp==1.0.2
  sphinxcontrib-serializinghtml==1.1.3
  tornado==6.0.3
  urllib3==1.25.3
  userpath==1.2.0
  Werkzeug==0.15.6
  xdot==1.1

[cs01]

Those commands are frequently automatically sent by gdbgui to refresh the UI. If the tool is gdb it should recognize those commands, and keep the UI in sync with gdb.

I don't know if you redacted the tool and replaced with tool_prompt, but the tool should accept "machine interface" syntax. With gdb, this is achieved with

gdb --interpreter=mi2

[surmish]

What is the right way to send the --interpreter=mi2 gdb argument to the gdbgui tool?

I am using gdb 8.3. The c++ binary I am debugging has a tcl interpreter in it.
(gdbgui -> gdb -> my_c_program -> tcl_interface_prompt)

Even something like pressing the tab key sends the complete command to the tcl prompt.

[cs01]

What is the right way to send the --interpreter=mi2 gdb argument to the gdbgui tool?

It's hard-coded in gdbgui's source code:

gdbgui/gdbgui/statemanager.py

Line 51 in fded49e

+ REQUIRED_GDB_FLAGS

I think the main problem here is that when gdbgui runs gdb as a subprocess, it does so in "non-interactive mode" because gdbgui is not using a pty. This works in most cases, but unfortunately running sub-interpreters like the one you have won't work. This is a deficiency in gdbgui and unfortunately it won't work for you use case until I change gdbgui to to use an interactive pty to launch gdb instead of launching gdb as a non-interactive subprocess.

[surmish]

Hmm okay. If this can be resolved it would be great. There aren't any other good gui debuggers around for gdb in linux. gdb-dashboard is what I've been using, which is fine for the most part, but scrolling through the source is not possible in the same window.

[cs01]

Thanks for the feedback. That is good motivation 😃 . I'll let you know if/when I add this.