GDB provides convenience variables that you can use within GDB to hold on to a value and refer to it later. These variables exist entirely within GDB; they aren't part of your program, and setting a convenience variable has no direct effect on further execution of your program. That's why you can use them freely.
Convenience variables are prefixed with $. Any name preceded by $ can be used for a convenience variable, unless it's one of the predefined machine-specific register names (see "Registers"). Value history references, in contrast, are numbers preceded by $. See "Value history."
You can save a value in a convenience variable with an assignment expression, just as you'd set a variable in your program. For example:
set $foo = *object_ptr
saves in $foo the value contained in the object pointed to by object_ptr.
Using a convenience variable for the first time creates it, but its value is void until you assign a new value. You can alter the value with another assignment at any time.
Convenience variables have no fixed types. You can assign to a convenience variable any type of value, including structures and arrays, even if that variable already has a value of a different type. The convenience variable, when used as an expression, has the type of its current value.
One of the ways to use a convenience variable is as a counter to be incremented or a pointer to be advanced. For example, to print a field from successive elements of an array of structures:
set $i = 0 print bar[$i++]->contents
Repeat that command by pressing Enter.
Some convenience variables are created automatically by GDB and given values likely to be useful: