22.4 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. Type <RET> when you want to see one more page of output, q to discard the remaining output, or c to continue without paging for the rest of the current command. 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 terminal driver software. For example, on Unix gdb uses 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

set height unlimited

show height

set width cpl

set width unlimited

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 either unlimited or 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 unlimited’ or ‘set width 0’ to prevent gdb from wrapping its output.

set pagination on

set pagination off

Turn the output pagination on or off; the default is on. Turning pagination off is the alternative to set height unlimited. Note that running gdb with the --batch option (see -batch) also automatically disables pagination.

show pagination

Show the current pagination mode.