Is there a way to use gdb to scan a process' memory for a set of values in a specified address range?

For instance, if the heap for my process ran from 0x08050000 - 0x0827d000, and I wanted to have gdb return the address of the first location it finds within that address range which contains the 4-byte sequence 0xa17ad376 ... what is the command to do this sort of thing?

If GDB cannot do this, could someone recommend a tool that does possess this capability?

Thanks,
jrtayloriv

Yes you can inspect your memory with gdb look a this page for help..

You just have to type the command like: x/2b 0x8048382, of course you should have permissions over the address.

Cheers.

Thank you for the link. But I already knew about using x addr to see the value held at addr.

What I was asking for was how to scan a range of memory for a specific value -- i.e. I'd like to be able to do something like:

mystery_search_command 0x08050000,0x0827d000 0xa17ad376

to do what I described in my original post.

Is there a way to do this?

--jrtayloriv

Sorry I didn't understand the question, well right now I can only come up with somenthing like this: supose you know the address you want to start with, in gdb you tell it this:

(gdb) set $x=0xbfeff9a0
(gdb) while(*++$x!=0x14 && $x<0xbfeff9a9)
>end
(gdb) p/x $x

here at the example in looking for the 0x14 in memory, and p/x will give me the addres where it was found or the end address, I hope it can be useful now.

Regards.

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Hmmm ... very good idea. I didn't think of looping through w/ the convenience variables like that. Thanks for the tip

--jrtayloriv

I have a file of C functions for doing complex things inside of GDB.
All of them are set up with do-nothing defaults, so when called they do not affect program behavior. (I do not have one for finding a memory value the way you specified. You also didn't indicate if the value was word-aligned or not. Makes a big difference in how you search.) I set up a single entry point in the code to force the linker to include them.

They do nothing. Unless.

You call the function in gdb "call functionname", with an already set breakpoint inside the function, change the arguments with set, and let it run. IF you need this often consider writing a simple

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