gdb-cpputest: debugging shortcut for CppUTest

When unit tests of a project are written using CppUTest, you may want to use gdb to examine a particular test failure. To to so, you often

• set a breakpoint at the beginning of the failing unit test
• provide arguments for the executable to only run the failing test (speeds things up).

In gdb-cpputest.py, one gdb command cppu is provided that assists in accomplishing these two things by searching for unit tests in the symbol table that match a given pattern.

Installation

Download the python file and source it in your (possibly project-specific) .gdbinit, e.g.

source /some/path/gdb-cpputest.py

Usage

Compile your project with debugging flags (e.g. -g -ggdb -O0) and start gdb. You can then use the cppu subcommands.

(gdb) file path/to/testexecutable
(gdb) cppu name-of-failing-test
(gdb) run

If name-of-failing-test was unambiguous, this example will stop at the first line of this test. Otherwise, a list of possible tests is printed out together with unique search strings to be used for the cppu invocation. The following (sub-)commands are available:

• cppu test [pattern] sets the command-line arguments (-sg groupname -sn testname) but no break points
• cppu break [pattern] sets command-line arguments, deletes test break points and sets a new one for the given test
• cppu clear deletes all breakpoints at unit test functions
• cppu [pattern] an alias for cppu break [pattern]

The pattern will be used for a case-insensitive search if it is lowercase, as soon as one capital character is present, a case-sensitive search is performed . It can be enriched by ^ and $ to indicate begin of the test group name and end of the test name itself. This circumvents situations in which the name of a test case (or group) is contained in another. Finally, in addition to the above commands, there is one boolean parameter:

• set cppu-color [on|off] controls whether colorized lists of tests are printed out

Explanation

A unit test "Bar" in the test group "Foo" declared by the CppUTest macro TEST(Foo, Bar) { ... } will result in function TEST_Foo_Bar_Test::testBody() { ... }. Thus, when using the above command, all entries in the symbol table matching TEST_.*_Test::testBody() will be filtered by the given pattern.