1 What is an Annotation?

To produce obsolete level two annotations, start ROCGDB with the --annotate=2 option.

Annotations start with a newline character, two ‘control-z’ characters, and the name of the annotation. If there is no additional information associated with this annotation, the name of the annotation is followed immediately by a newline. If there is additional information, the name of the annotation is followed by a space, the additional information, and a newline. The additional information cannot contain newline characters.

Any output not beginning with a newline and two ‘control-z’ characters denotes literal output from ROCGDB. Currently there is no need for ROCGDB to output a newline followed by two ‘control-z’ characters, but if there was such a need, the annotations could be extended with an ‘escape’ annotation which means those three characters as output.

A simple example of starting up ROCGDB with annotations is:

$ gdb --annotate=2
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GDB is free software, covered by the GNU General Public License,
and you are welcome to change it and/or distribute copies of it
under certain conditions.
Type "show copying" to see the conditions.
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for details.
This GDB was configured as "sparc-sun-sunos4.1.3"

^Z^Zpre-prompt
(gdb) 
^Z^Zprompt
quit

^Z^Zpost-prompt
$ 

Here ‘quit’ is input to ROCGDB; the rest is output from ROCGDB. The three lines beginning ‘^Z^Z’ (where ‘^Z’ denotes a ‘control-z’ character) are annotations; the rest is output from ROCGDB.