4.6 Your Program’s Input and Output

By default, the program you run under GDB does input and output to the same terminal that GDB uses. GDB switches the terminal to its own terminal modes to interact with you, but it records the terminal modes your program was using and switches back to them when you continue running your program.

info terminal

Displays information recorded by GDB about the terminal modes your program is using.

You can redirect your program’s input and/or output using shell redirection with the run command. For example,

run > outfile

starts your program, diverting its output to the file outfile.

Another way to specify where your program should do input and output is with the tty command. This command accepts a file name as argument, and causes this file to be the default for future run commands. It also resets the controlling terminal for the child process, for future run commands. For example,

tty /dev/ttyb

directs that processes started with subsequent run commands default to do input and output on the terminal /dev/ttyb and have that as their controlling terminal.

An explicit redirection in run overrides the tty command’s effect on the input/output device, but not its effect on the controlling terminal.

When you use the tty command or redirect input in the run command, only the input for your program is affected. The input for GDB still comes from your terminal. tty is an alias for set inferior-tty.

You can use the show inferior-tty command to tell GDB to display the name of the terminal that will be used for future runs of your program.

set inferior-tty [ tty ]

Set the tty for the program being debugged to tty. Omitting tty restores the default behavior, which is to use the same terminal as GDB.

show inferior-tty

Show the current tty for the program being debugged.