[RFA] candidates for ambiguous command in upper case

Pedro Alves palves@redhat.com
Thu Jan 12 16:37:00 GMT 2017


On 01/12/2017 10:18 AM, Jerome Guitton wrote:
> Pedro Alves (palves@redhat.com):
> 
>> I can only guess on original motivation -- maybe to make GDB usable
>> with uppercase-only terminals?  Those were common at some point in
>> the past.  I think Linux's terminal subsystem might still have
>> support for those.   But then symbol searching was not case-insensitive,
>> ("set case-sensitive off" support was only added much later), so I
>> can't quite imagine how that'd be much usable.
> 
> I'm not sure of the original motivation; but I guess that if it has
> been there for thirty years it is now considered as the standard
> interface by a few users.

Dunno, if it doesn't make sense, and nobody uses it, then it's one
less thing to maintain and test.  We don't treat command options
as case insensitive.  E.g.:

 (gdb) watch -locaTION *main
 No symbol "locaTION" in current context.

 (gdb) p /x obj
 $1 = 0x4007a0
 (gdb) p /X obj
 No symbol "X" in current context.

Etc.

If we removed support for case insensitive commands, then it may
open up interesting uses.

> In any case, even if we decide to change that, consistency would be
> good, at least for CLI; the same policy for casing should apply in all
> cases of completion.
> 
> Documenting it in the user manual would be good indeed; I'm not sure
> where the proper place would be though.

The place where I had expected to find it was where we talk about
unambiguous command abbreviations.  I.e., the very first thing
the manual talks about, once GDB is up and running:

 https://sourceware.org/gdb/current/onlinedocs/gdb/Commands.html#Commands

Thanks,
Pedro Alves



More information about the Gdb-patches mailing list