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Screen size

Certain commands to GDB may produce large amounts of information output to the screen. To help you read all of it, GDB pauses and asks you for input at the end of each page of output. Use the Return key when you want to continue the output, or type q to discard the remaining output. Also, the screen width setting determines when to wrap lines of output. Depending on what is being printed, GDB tries to break the line at a readable place, rather than simply letting it overflow onto the following line.

Normally, GDB knows the size of the screen from the termcap data base together with the value of the TERM environment variable and the stty rows and stty cols settings. If this is not correct, you can override it with the set height and set width commands:

set height lpp

show height

set width cpl

show width
These set commands specify a screen height of lpp lines and a screen width of cpl characters. The associated show commands display the current settings. If you specify a height of zero lines, GDB does not pause during output no matter how long the output is. This is useful if output is to a file or to an editor buffer.

Likewise, you can specify ‘set width 0’ to prevent GDB from wrapping its output.