YUyurymik·Jan 4, 2023
You can go other way around and use other TUIs for GDB:
* https://github.com/pwndbg/pwndbg
* https://github.com/longld/peda
* https://github.com/hugsy/gef
In Emulating an emulator inside itself. Meet Blinkpwndbg
pwndbg
Python2017–2023
pwndbg / pwndbg
pwndbg
Exploit Development and Reverse Engineering with GDB & LLDB Made Easy
9Distinct people
9Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
11.2KGitHub stars
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What it is
Exploit Development and Reverse Engineering with GDB & LLDB Made Easy
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
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Also in these discussions
- longld/peda · linked in 3 of the same discussions
- hugsy/gef · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year9 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2017-08-12 16:20:48 UTC to 2023-01-04 22:24:10 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
9 sourcesThere are a lot of these types of tools already in the reverse engineering community (in order of lowest chance of breaking when you throw really weird stuff at it, in my experience):
GEF: https://gef.readthedocs.io/en/master/
PWNDBG: https://github.com/pwndbg/pwndbg
PEDA: https://github.com/longld/peda
They also come with a slew of different features to aid in RE/exploit dev, but many of them are also useful for debugging really weird issues.
Also if you don't need all the info these provide or just want to augment them, the tool you are looking for is "hook-stop" which allows you to execute a string of commands every time GDB pauses program execution.
In Hacked GDB Dashboard Puts It All on DisplayI'll also plug pwndbg[1] here.
Like Gef it greatly extends the utility of GDB, and is oriented around exploit development.
[1] https://github.com/pwndbg/pwndbg
In Debugging with GDBGDB is great. I definitely recommend checking out watchpoints as well, a very useful tool for monitoring how a variable changes over time.
GDB also has many good plugins - pwndbg has tons of features and UI improvements over stock GDB.
https://sourceware.org/gdb/onlinedocs/gdb/Set-Watchpoints.ht...
https://github.com/pwndbg/pwndbg
In Debugging with GDBNot only does it do this, it does all kinds of forward emulation, thanks to Unicorn.
https://github.com/pwndbg/pwndbg/blob/dev/caps/disasm_taken_...
This also works for stepping through e.g. ROP gadgets during exploitation.
In How to look at the stack with gdbI think you would love pwndbg
https://github.com/pwndbg/pwndbg
In The State of Linux Debuggers* `perf top`
* `scan-build`
* https://github.com/pwndbg/pwndbg, a very comprehensive gdb extension/config.
In Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?Pwndbg – Exploit Development and Reverse Engineering with GDB Made Easy
1 points · Open discussionFirst of all, I agree! GDB without extensions is not that nice to use. But there exist several extensions (https://github.com/cyrus-and/gdb-dashboard, https://github.com/hugsy/gef, https://github.com/pwndbg/pwndbg, https://github.com/longld/peda, even though developed for it, these are not only useful for exploit dev!) that make it a lot better.
> - No way to get a 16-column (bytes+ASCII) standard hexdump. This is functionality that even the most basic debugger should have, yet it's missing from gdb.
This should be quite easy to implement as a small python snippet that you put in your ~/.gdbinit. Granted, this should be builtin functionality, but it also shows how extensible GDB can be.
> - If you write "b 0x12345" intending to set a breakpoint at address 0x12345, it doesn't work. An unnecessary and nonsensical extra asterisk is needed (w
Read the rest
hich makes it look like it's retrieving 4/8 bytes from 0x12345, and using that as the address of the breakpoint.)
Agreed, I never understood why that was necessary. It is really annoying. Perhaps someone wanted to avoid a conflict if you had a symbol named "0x12345"? (can you even do that?)
> - Starting gdb with a binary and passing arguments to it --- you'd expect it to be smart enough to realise that anything after the executable name should be the arguments to the debuggee and not the debugger, but it isnt.
I recently learned that gdb has a neat option called --args, that does exactly this:
gdb --args program arg1 arg2
GDB feels quite similar to VIM to me: you have to spent some time to get used to it, it has some warts but it is very flexible and useful if you know it.