I knew when I posted yesterday’s article on inspecting a live Ruby process that I wasn’t the first to have done that with GDB—I just didn’t know of anyone else who had. But given that I’m not a GDB guru, and there are much brighter people than me playing with Ruby’s internals, I was sure it had been done before.

I was not wrong, apparently. And not only had it been done before, it had been done better. I was delighted to see that Mauricio Fernandez has shared a collection of GDB helpers that make it easy to cheat. He defines a bunch of custom GDB functions that let you basically eval Ruby code right there from GDB! Really, really cool. Definitely give it a look.