Searching STL containers

[jimparker at mail dot utexas dot edu]

I am looking for a method to examine the contents of STL containers using gdb.
and I hit upon a site hosted by Gilad Mishne

http://staff.science.uva.nl/~gilad/stl/stl_gdb.html

and found a related thread on this forum

http://sourceware.org/ml/gdb/2004-05/msg00179.html

Adapting from these two posts I generated the following definition

define plist
	set $next = $arg0->_M_node._M_next
	#This is stupid _prev._next... but I can't get it to find the
	# end otherwise...
	set $end = $arg0->_M_node._M_prev._M_next
	set $listp = {&$arg0._M_node}
	while ($next != $end)
                # the assignment to ._M_prev is a hack that works...
                # otherwise, I am one node off  
		set (void*)*$listp = $next._M_prev
		p (*$listp)._M_data
		set $next = $next->_M_next
	end
end


that is a quick hack.  I would appreciate if someone would explain/correct the
above pointer references to make it cleaner.  But I present it as is, since it
works for my purposes, and perhaps will be useful to others.  This is very
similar to the 
C++ journal article mentioned, but I explicitly defined setbegin, setend,
and the pointer assignment.

Gilad,
  On your site you type cast the $listp as (_List_node*) which doesn't seem to 
work for me.  In my STL library (g++) the typename _List_node is templated and
therefore requires the node class name and the std:: scope. i.e.
('std::_List_node<int>')  

For reference, I'm using
gcc 3.3.1 -gdwarf-2
gdb 6.3.50


Cheers,
Jim