Source and machine code

You can use the command info line to map source lines to program addresses (and vice versa), and the command disassemble to display a range of addresses as machine instructions. When run under GNU Emacs mode, the info line command causes the arrow to point to the line specified. Also, info line prints addresses in symbolic form as well as hex.

info line linespec: Print the starting and ending addresses of the compiled code for source line linespec. You can specify source lines in any of the ways understood by the list command (see "Printing source lines").

For example, we can use info line to discover the location of the object code for the first line of function m4_changequote:

(gdb) info line m4_changecom
Line 895 of "builtin.c" starts at pc 0x634c and ends at 0x6350.

We can also inquire (using *addr as the form for linespec) what source line covers a particular address:

(gdb) info line *0x63ff
Line 926 of "builtin.c" starts at pc 0x63e4 and ends at 0x6404.

After info line, the default address for the x command is changed to the starting address of the line, so that x/i is sufficient to begin examining the machine code (see "Examining memory"). Also, this address is saved as the value of the convenience variable $_ (see "Convenience variables").

disassemble: This specialized command dumps a range of memory as machine instructions. The default memory range is the function surrounding the program counter of the selected frame. A single argument to this command is a program counter value; GDB dumps the function surrounding this value. Two arguments specify a range of addresses (first inclusive, second exclusive) to dump.

We can use disassemble to inspect the object code range shown in the last info line example (the example shows SPARC machine instructions):

(gdb) disas 0x63e4 0x6404
Dump of assembler code from 0x63e4 to 0x6404:
0x63e4 <builtin_init+5340>:     ble 0x63f8 <builtin_init+5360>
0x63e8 <builtin_init+5344>:     sethi %hi(0x4c00), %o0
0x63ec <builtin_init+5348>:     ld [%i1+4], %o0
0x63f0 <builtin_init+5352>:     b 0x63fc <builtin_init+5364>
0x63f4 <builtin_init+5356>:     ld [%o0+4], %o0
0x63f8 <builtin_init+5360>:     or %o0, 0x1a4, %o0
0x63fc <builtin_init+5364>:     call 0x9288 <path_search>
0x6400 <builtin_init+5368>:     nop
End of assembler dump.

set assembly-language instruction-set: This command selects the instruction set to use when disassembling the program via the disassemble or x/i commands. It's useful for architectures that have more than one native instruction set.
Currently it's defined only for the Intel x86 family. You can set instruction-set to either i386 or i8086. The default is i386.