Syntax

The debugger processes commands from standard input. If standard input is a terminal, MDB provides terminal editing capabilities. MDB can also process commands from macro files and from dcmd pipelines, described below. The language syntax is designed around the concept of computing the value of an expression (typically a memory address in the target), and applying a dcmd to that address. The current address location is referred to as dot, and " . " is used to reference its value.

A metacharacter is one of the following characters:

[ ] | ! / \ ? = > $ : ; NEWLINE SPACE TAB

A blank is a TAB or a SPACE. A word is a sequence of characters separated by one or more non-quoted metacharacters. Some of the metacharacters function only as delimiters in certain contexts, as described below. An identifier is a sequence of letters, digits, underscores, periods, or back quotes beginning with a letter, underscore, or period. Identifiers are used as the names of symbols, variables, dcmds, and walkers. Commands are delimited by a NEWLINE or semicolon ( ; ).

A dcmd is denoted by one of the following words or metacharacters:

/ \ ? = > $character :character ::identifier

dcmds named by metacharacters or prefixed by a single $ or : are provided as built-in operators, and implement complete compatibility with the command set of the legacy adb(1) utility. After a dcmd has been parsed, the /, \, ?, =, >, $, and : characters are no longer recognized as metacharacters until the termination of the argument list.

A simple-command is a dcmd followed by a sequence or zero or more blank-separated words. The words are passed as arguments to the invoked dcmd, except as specified under "Arithmetic Expansion" and "Quoting". Each dcmd returns an exit status that indicates it was either successful, failed, or was invoked with invalid arguments.

A pipeline is a sequence of one or more simple commands separated by |. Unlike the shell, dcmds in MDB pipelines are not executed as separate processes. After the pipeline has been parsed, each dcmd is invoked in order from left to right. Each dcmd's output is processed and stored as described in "dcmd Pipelines". After the left-hand dcmd is complete, its processed output is used as input for the next dcmd in the pipeline. If any dcmd does not return a successful exit status, the pipeline is aborted.

An expression is a sequence of words that is evaluated to compute a 64-bit unsigned integer value. The words are evaluated using the rules described in "Arithmetic Expansion".