How to get the relative address of a field in a structure dump. [C]
For anyone reading this years later, maybe following a search engine result: Since gdb 8.1, its builtin ptype
command has the /o
flag for this.
It will print offset and size of MyType's members and also "holes" (padding), like:
(gdb) ptype /o MyType
/* offset | size */ type = class MyType {
/* 0 | 4 */ int foo;
/* XXX 4-byte hole */
/* 8 | 8 */ void* ptr;
/* total size (bytes): 16 */
}
You can do it with gdb
. As an example, I'll use this source:
struct A {
int a;
char b;
short c;
};
int main() {
struct A a;
}
Loading up the binary in gdb
:
(gdb) print (int)&((struct A*)0)->a
$1 = 0
(gdb) print (int)&((struct A*)0)->b
$2 = 4
(gdb) print (int)&((struct A*)0)->c
$3 = 6
UPDATE:
If you need to do it for a large number of fields, then you may find it handy to use GDB's new python interface (you'll need a recent version of GDB to use it, I'm using 7.4). I've created offsets.py:
import gdb
class Offsets(gdb.Command):
def __init__(self):
super (Offsets, self).__init__ ('offsets-of', gdb.COMMAND_DATA)
def invoke(self, arg, from_tty):
argv = gdb.string_to_argv(arg)
if len(argv) != 1:
raise gdb.GdbError('offsets-of takes exactly 1 argument.')
stype = gdb.lookup_type(argv[0])
print argv[0], '{'
for field in stype.fields():
print ' %s => %d' % (field.name, field.bitpos//8)
print '}'
Offsets()
Then you can add to your .gdbinit:
python
sys.path.insert(0, '/path/to/script/dir')
import offsets
end
Then using it in GDB, like:
(gdb) offsets-of "struct A"
struct A {
a => 0
b => 4
c => 6
}
This script makes a few simplifying assumptions, like that you don't use bitfields, and it doesn't dig into nested structs, but those changes are3 fairly straightforward if you need them.