Is there any way to tell GDB to wait for a process to start and attach to it?

Question

Here is my script called gdbwait:

#!/bin/sh
progstr=$1
progpid=`pgrep -o $progstr`
while [ "$progpid" = "" ]; do
  progpid=`pgrep -o $progstr`
done
gdb -ex continue -p $progpid

Usage:

gdbwait my_program

Sure it can be written nicer but Bourne shell script syntax is painful for me so if it works then I leave it alone. 🙂

If the new process launches and dies too quickly, add 1 second delay in your own program for debugging.