[gdb] How to disassemble a memory range with GDB?

I'm trying to disassemble a program to see a syscall assembly instruction (the INT instruction, I believe) and the handler with GDB and have written a little program (see below) for it that opens and closes a file.

I was able to follow the call to fopen with GDB until it executed a call.

When I tried to tell GDB "disassemble 0x...." (address of call) it responded with 'No function contains specified address.'

Is it possible to force GDB to disassemble (or display it in assembler as good as possible) that memory address? If so, how?

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

int main() {
    FILE* f;
    f = fopen("main.c", "r");
    if (!f) { 
      perror("open");
      return -1;
    }
    fclose(f);
    return 0;
}

If all that you want is to see the disassembly with the INTC call, use objdump -d as someone mentioned but use the -static option when compiling. Otherwise the fopen function is not compiled into the elf and is linked at runtime.

You can force gcc to output directly to assembly code by adding the -S switch

gcc -S hello.c

This isn't the direct answer to your question, but since you seem to just want to disassemble the binary, perhaps you could just use objdump:

objdump -d program

This should give you its dissassembly. You can add -S if you want it source-annotated.

gdb disassemble has a /m to include source code alongside the instructions. This is equivalent of objdump -S, with the extra benefit of confining to just the one function (or address-range) of interest.

fopen() is a C library function and so you won't see any syscall instructions in your code, just a regular function call. At some point, it does call open(2), but it does that via a trampoline. There is simply a jump to the VDSO page, which is provided by the kernel to every process. The VDSO then provides code to make the system call. On modern processors, the SYSCALL or SYSENTER instructions will be used, but you can also use INT 80h on x86 processors.

You don't have to use gdb. GCC will do it.

 gcc -S foo.c

This will create foo.s which is the assembly.

gcc -m32 -c -g -Wa,-a,-ad foo.c > foo.lst

The above version will create a listing file that has both the C and the assembly generated by it. GCC FAQ

Yeah, disassemble is not the best command to use here. The command you want is "x/i" (examine as instructions):

(gdb) x/i 0xdeadbeef