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Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies.

Copyright (C) 1994 Free Software Foundation

What is an Annotation?

To produce annotations, start GDB with the --annotate=2 option.

Annotations start with a newline character, two `control-z' characters, and the name of the annotation. If there is no additional information associated with this annotation, the name of the annotation is followed immediately by a newline. If there is additional information, the name of the annotation is followed by a space, the additional information, and a newline. The additional information cannot contain newline characters.

Any output not beginning with a newline and two `control-z' characters denotes literal output from GDB. Currently there is no need for GDB to output a newline followed by two `control-z' characters, but if there was such a need, the annotations could be extended with an `escape' annotation which means those three characters as output.

A simple example of starting up GDB with annotations is:

$ gdb --annotate=2
GDB is free software and you are welcome to distribute copies of it
 under certain conditions; type "show copying" to see the conditions.
There is absolutely no warranty for GDB; type "show warranty" for details.
GDB 4.12.3 (sparc-sun-sunos4.1.3), 
Copyright 1994 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

^Z^Zpre-prompt
(gdb) 
^Z^Zprompt
quit

^Z^Zpost-prompt
$ 

Here `quit' is input to GDB; the rest is output from GDB. The three lines beginning `^Z^Z' (where `^Z' denotes a `control-z' character) are annotations; the rest is output from GDB.


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