This is the mail archive of the
gdb-patches@sourceware.org
mailing list for the GDB project.
Re: [RFA] candidates for ambiguous command in upper case
On 01/12/2017 10:18 AM, Jerome Guitton wrote:
> Pedro Alves (palves@redhat.com):
>
>> I can only guess on original motivation -- maybe to make GDB usable
>> with uppercase-only terminals? Those were common at some point in
>> the past. I think Linux's terminal subsystem might still have
>> support for those. But then symbol searching was not case-insensitive,
>> ("set case-sensitive off" support was only added much later), so I
>> can't quite imagine how that'd be much usable.
>
> I'm not sure of the original motivation; but I guess that if it has
> been there for thirty years it is now considered as the standard
> interface by a few users.
Dunno, if it doesn't make sense, and nobody uses it, then it's one
less thing to maintain and test. We don't treat command options
as case insensitive. E.g.:
(gdb) watch -locaTION *main
No symbol "locaTION" in current context.
(gdb) p /x obj
$1 = 0x4007a0
(gdb) p /X obj
No symbol "X" in current context.
Etc.
If we removed support for case insensitive commands, then it may
open up interesting uses.
> In any case, even if we decide to change that, consistency would be
> good, at least for CLI; the same policy for casing should apply in all
> cases of completion.
>
> Documenting it in the user manual would be good indeed; I'm not sure
> where the proper place would be though.
The place where I had expected to find it was where we talk about
unambiguous command abbreviations. I.e., the very first thing
the manual talks about, once GDB is up and running:
https://sourceware.org/gdb/current/onlinedocs/gdb/Commands.html#Commands
Thanks,
Pedro Alves