MEMORY-ANALYZER(1)

💖 MEMORY-ANALYZER 💖

okay bestie, buckle up, because we're talking about memory-analyzer — a lil command from the User Commands corner of the manual, and it's literally the coolest way to freeze-frame your program's whole vibe mid-run. 🧊✨

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✨ NAME ✨

memory-analyzer — Snapshot program state for symbolic analysis 🫶

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

memory-analyzer [-?] [-h] [--help]
       show help

memory-analyzer --version
       show version

memory-analyzer --symbols symbol_list [options] binary
       analyze binary

Like, three whole moods, okay? You can ask for help, you can ask for the version, or you can actually analyze a binary. Pick your fighter. 💅

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

So memory-analyzer is a front-end — a cute lil bestie that runs and queries gdb(1) for you — and its whole job is to get a snapshot of your input program's state at one particular program location. That snapshot is genuinely useful all on its own: you can peek at what your variables are holding at some exact spot in the code. And because that snapshot is a state of a valid concrete execution, you can also feed it into other analyses later. It's giving main character energy, honestly. 👑

To analyze a program with memory-analyzer, it has to be compiled with goto-gcc(1). That gives you an elf(5) executable that also carries a goto-cc section holding the goto model:

goto-gcc -g input_program.c -o input_program_exe

memory-analyzer supports two ways of running gdb(1) on your code: either run from a core-file, or run up to a break-point. 🎯

• If you already have a core-file, you tell it with the option --core-file cf.
• If you know the point in your program where you want the analysis to start from, you tell it with the option --breakpoint bp.

Only one of core-file/break-point can be used. not both. pick one, bestie. 🙈

The tool also expects a comma-separated list of symbols to analyze, passed via --symbols s1,s2,.... It calls up gdb(1) to grab that snapshot, which is exactly why the -g option is necessary when you compile — otherwise your program symbols simply aren't visible. no symbols, no snapshot, no slay. 😭

Take, for example, this program:

// main.c
void checkpoint() {}

int array[] = {1, 2, 3};

int main() {
  array[1] = 4;
  checkpoint();
  return 0;
}

Say we're interested in the evaluation of array at the call-site of checkpoint. We compile the program with:

goto-gcc -g main.c -o main_exe

And then we call memory-analyzer with:

memory-analyzer --breakpoint checkpoint --symbols array main_exe

and the output is the human readable list of values for each requested symbol:

{
  array = { 1, 4, 3 };
}

That result is great for you and your preliminary analysis, but ngl it doesn't hold enough info for further automated analyses. So to that end, memory-analyzer has an option for the snapshot to be represented in the format of a symbol table — that's --symtab-snapshot. 💖

And finally, to get output in JSON format — like, say, for further analyses by goto-harness(1) — you also pass the additional option --json-ui to memory-analyzer:

memory-analyzer --symtab-snapshot --json-ui --breakpoint checkpoint
  --symbols array main_exe > snapshot.json

obsessed. 🌈

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🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

• --core-file file_name — Analyze from core dump file_name.
• --breakpoint breakpoint — Analyze from given breakpoint.
• --symbols symbol_list — List of symbols to analyze.
• --symtab-snapshot — Output snapshot as JSON symbol table that can be used with symtab2gb(1).
• --output-file file_name — Write snapshot to file_name.
• --json-ui — Output snapshot in JSON format.

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🌸 ENVIRONMENT 🌸

All tools honor the TMPDIR environment variable when generating temporary files and directories. so if you wanna control where the temp stuff lives, that's your girl. 💅

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💀 BUGS 💀

If you encounter a problem, please create an issue at https://github.com/diffblue/cbmc/issues — fr fr, they wanna know. 🐛

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🧚 SEE ALSO 🧚

cbmc(1), elf(5), gdb(1), goto-gcc(1), goto-harness(1), symtab2gb(1) — the whole friend group. iykyk. ✨

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👑 COPYRIGHT 👑

2019, Malte Mues, Diffblue. periodt. 💜

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k that's the whole page, bestie 🫶 this was memory-analyzer-5.59.0 from June 2022, and honestly? iconic. go snapshot something. ⭐