System("pause") in Unix?

Question

I normally use a debugger such as cgdb so I thankfully hadn't needed to resort to system calls for debugging, until now.

I have a binary that takes around 30 minutes to load in gdb and frequently crashes the debugger thereafter, probably due to the very large number of symbols. This makes my normal workflow (loading gdb, adding breakpoints, identifying problem variables, etc.) untenable.

In windows I would at this point begin adding lots of cout and system("pause") (poor man's breakpoint) statements throughout my code; but how do I do this in a unix-like environment?

score 13 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 08 '14 at 23:45

13

You may want to read from cin to get a poor man’s pause – it will wait for you to type an Enter, rather than resuming while you’re getting coffee (as sleep() will).

answered Sep 08 '14 at 23:45

G-Man Says 'Reinstate Monica'

22,870

score 6 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:39

6

I sometimes resort to this

#define BRK()  do { printf("%s %d\n", __FILE__, __LINE__); getchar(); } while (0)
...
BRK();  // Stop and wait for enter

Also, function instrumentation might help: GCC allows to hook into every function enter/exit, see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2281739/automatically-adding-enter-exit-function-logs-to-a-project

edited May 23 '17 at 12:39

Community

1

answered Sep 09 '14 at 11:06

valenok

161

Maybe your C is different from mine, but I either have to put parens in the define or delete them in the call for this to work. Otherwise, that's a handy tip! – labyrinth Jan 09 '15 at 18:18
Yeah, thanks for the correction, added parens – valenok Jan 10 '15 at 00:22

score 5 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 08 '14 at 23:27

5

Same thing for cout/cerr, and you can just use sleep() - see man 3 sleep or man 3 usleep for more info.

answered Sep 08 '14 at 23:27

Aaron D. Marasco

5,758

System("pause") in Unix?

3 Answers3