GEF (pronounced ʤɛf - "Jeff") is a set of commands for x86/64, ARM, MIPS, PowerPC and SPARC to assist exploit developers and reverse-engineers when using old school GDB. It provides additional features to GDB using the Python API to assist during the process of dynamic analysis and exploit development. Application developers will also benefit from it, as GEF lifts a great part of regular GDB obscurity, avoiding repeating traditional commands, or bringing out the relevant information from the debugging runtime.

Instant Setup

Simply make sure you have GDB 10.0 or higher compiled with Python3.10+ bindings, then:

# via the install script
## using curl
$ bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://gef.blah.cat/sh)"

## using wget
$ bash -c "$(wget https://gef.blah.cat/sh -O -)"

# or manually
$ wget -O ~/.gdbinit-gef.py -q https://gef.blah.cat/py
$ echo source ~/.gdbinit-gef.py >> ~/.gdbinit

# or alternatively from inside gdb directly
$ gdb -q
(gdb) pi import urllib.request as u, tempfile as t; g=t.NamedTemporaryFile(suffix='-gef.py'); open(g.name, 'wb+').write(u.urlopen('https://tinyurl.com/gef-main').read()); gdb.execute('source %s' % g.name)

You can immediately see that GEF is correctly installed by launching GDB:

gef-context

A few of GEF features include:

One single GDB script
Entirely architecture agnostic, NO dependencies: GEF is battery-included and is installable instantly
Fast limiting the number of dependencies and optimizing code to make the commands as fast as possible
Provides a great variety of commands to drastically change your experience in GDB.
Easily extensible to create other commands by providing d more comprehensible layout to GDB Python API.
Full Python3 support (Python2 support was dropped - see gef-legacy).
Built around an architecture abstraction layer, so all commands work in any GDB-supported architecture such as x86-32/64, ARMv5/6/7, AARCH64, SPARC, MIPS, PowerPC, etc.
Suited for real-life apps debugging, exploit development, just as much as CTF
And a lot more commands contributed by the community available on GEF-Extras !!

Check out the Screenshot page for more or try it online (user:gef/password:gef-demo)

Documentation

Unlike other GDB plugins, GEF has an extensive and up-to-date documentation. Users are recommended to refer to it as it may help them in their attempts to use GEF. In particular, new users should navigate through it (see the FAQ for common installation problems), and the problem persists, try to reach out for help on the Discord channel or submit an issue.