Compressed STB Files

Code Watch handles compressed STB files. If you wish to compress your STB files, do so, and the debugger will uncompress them when it needs to access them. This happens, for example, when you step into a new evaluation environment for which the STB file has been compressed. An STB file is only uncompressed once during a debug session and remains uncompressed until you quit the debugger.

When you quit the debugger, you will be given a list of STB files that have been uncompressed during the debug session. You will be asked whether or not you would like to re-compress the files.

When quitting the debugger, you need not wait while all the STB files are being re-compressed. The re-compression process is forked off into another process.

Debug sessions run by another user accessing the same set of STB files with which you are working will not compress or uncompress an STB file out from under you. When the debugger is in the process of uncompressing an STB file, it writes a lock file to the directory in which your STB files reside, telling other debugger processes to wait until the uncompression is finished (for that STB file).

Note:

To write the lock file and to do the actual uncompression you must have write permission to the directory in which your STB files exist.

It is possible to use a compression utility other than compress. To do this, you must set the following three environment variables:

CW_COMPRESS_COMMAND Set this environment variable to the command used to compress the STB files.
CW_UNCOMPRESS_COMMAND      Set this environment variable to the command used to uncompress the STB files.
CW_COMPRESS_SUFFIX Set this environment variable to the suffix that denotes that the file is compressed (.Z for the compress utility).

The following are command-line examples for setting these environment variables:

setenv CW_COMPRESS_COMMAND   pack
setenv CW_UNCOMPRESS_COMMAND unpack 
setenv CW_COMPRESS_SUFFIX    .z

The following command-line switches are used for the handling of compressed STB files:

-nocompress Tells the debugger not to look for compressed STB files. If you are not going to compress your STB files, this is a good switch to use, because it saves the debugger that extra time of looking for compressed STB files.
-forcecompress   Causes the debugger to re-compress automatically any files that have been uncompressed during the debug session, without prompting you when you Quit out of the debugger. In the command-line interface, you will still be given a list of which files will be re-compressed, but in the Windows interface you will not be given this information.