TL:DR

Command Files allow you to start up gdb in a way that saves you typing the same commands over and over, even doing some of the ‘driving’ for you. I’m not suggesting that this is the best way to use gdb but I found it really helpful and I saved a bunch of time. I’m blogging it for my own reference and to help others find a lesser known, but very useful feature of the tool.

Background

While working on the SLAE64 course assessments, I found myself jumping in and out of gdb a lot. Constantly rebuilding and refining my shellcode test binaries meant that I ended up in constant cycle of doing a whole heap of setup in gdb to get things the way I wanted them, only to spend a few seconds debugging the target, then quitting, tweaking the code, rebuilding and repeating the whole process again.

I’m not a great typist, but I keyed in this sequence so many times that I could probably do it in my sleep:

layout asm
layout reg
break _start
run

There has to be a better way.