Debugging with GDB: Working Directory

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4.5 Your Program’s Working Directory

Each time you start your program with run, the inferior will be initialized with the current working directory specified by the set cwd command. If no directory has been specified by this command, then the inferior will inherit GDB’s current working directory as its working directory if native debugging, or it will inherit the remote server’s current working directory if remote debugging.

set cwd [ directory ]

Set the inferior’s working directory to directory, which will be glob-expanded in order to resolve tildes (~). If no argument has been specified, the command clears the setting and resets it to an empty state. This setting has no effect on GDB’s working directory, and it only takes effect the next time you start the inferior. The ~ in directory is a short for the home directory, usually pointed to by the HOME environment variable. On MS-Windows, if HOME is not defined, GDB uses the concatenation of HOMEDRIVE and HOMEPATH as fallback.

You can also change GDB’s current working directory by using the cd command. See cd command

show cwd

Show the inferior’s working directory. If no directory has been specified by set cwd, then the default inferior’s working directory is the same as GDB’s working directory.

cd [ directory ]

Set the GDB working directory to directory. If not given, directory uses '~'.

The GDB working directory serves as a default for the commands that specify files for GDB to operate on. See Commands to Specify Files. See set cwd command

pwd

Print the GDB working directory.

It is generally impossible to find the current working directory of the process being debugged (since a program can change its directory during its run). If you work on a system where GDB is configured with the /proc support, you can use the info proc command (see SVR4 Process Information) to find out the current working directory of the debuggee.

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