When this message is printed, you need to disable or remove some of the hardware-assisted breakpoints and watchpoints, and then continue.

5.2 Continuing and stepping

Continuing means resuming program execution until your program completes normally. In contrast, stepping means executing just one more “step” of your program, where “step” may mean either one line of source code, or one machine instruction (depending on what particular command you use). Either when continuing or when stepping, your program may stop even sooner, due to a breakpoint or a signal. (If it stops due to a signal, you may want to use handle, or use 'signal 0' to resume execution. See “Signals” (page 67).)

continue [ignore-count],c

Resume program execution, at the address where

[ignore-count],fg

your program last stopped; any breakpoints set at

[ignore-count]

that address are bypassed. The optional argument

 

ignore-countallows you to specify a further

 

number of times to ignore a breakpoint at this

 

location; its effect is like that of ignore (see “Break

 

conditions” (page 59)).

 

The argument ignore-countis meaningful only

 

when your program stopped due to a breakpoint.

 

At other times, the argument to continue is

 

ignored.

 

The synonyms c and fg (for foreground, as the

 

debugged program is deemed to be the foreground

 

program) are provided purely for convenience,

 

and have exactly the same behavior as continue.

To resume execution at a different place, you can use return (see “Returning from a function” (page 121)) to go back to the calling function; or jump (see “Continuing at a different address” (page 120)) to go to an arbitrary location in your program.

A typical technique for using stepping is to set a breakpoint (see “Breakpoints” (page 51)) at the beginning of the function or the section of your program where a problem is believed to lie, run your program until it stops at that breakpoint, and then step through the suspect area, examining the variables that are interesting, until you see the problem happen.

64 Stopping and Continuing