tl;dr - Build gdb trunk, then run help skip to be pleasantly surprised.

After more than a year, I've finally landed a patch to GDB which allows you to skip uninteresting files and functions while stepping. In particular, you can now say "never step into any function in nsCOMPtr.h"!

This helps when you're debugging code like the following:

nsCOMPtr foo;
foo->DoSomething();

Usually, you want to step into DoSomething(), but you don't want to step into nsCOMPtr's operator -> function.

With the patch, you can step into nsCOMPtr.h and then skip file. Now nsCOMPtr.h will be marked as "not for stepping", and you'll always step over it.

(It's actually a bit more complicated than this: Last time I checked, nsCOMPtr.h is included many times under different names, as nsCOMPtr.h, ../nsCOMPtr.h, ../../nsCOMPtr.h, and so on. GDB sees these each as separate files, so you have to skip each one individually. You can work around this if you put skip nsCOMPtr.h, skip ../nsCOMPtr.h, etc. in your .gdbinit. Or you can talk to me about implementing regular expression matching for skips, which shouldn't be too hard.)

You can also mark a certain function for stepping over with skip function.

Skips work like breakpoints; you can enable, disable, and delete them with enable/disable/delete skip N, and you can list them with info skip. Hopefully the documentation in help skip is sufficient, but if not, please let me know.

If you think this feature is interesting, update to trunk (gdb is easy to build) and let me know how it goes!

Thanks to the GDB folks who patiently guided my patch through many reviews, and to Dawson Engler for letting me work on this project while I was in school!