Physics Hacker

If you run a python script that imports GaudiPython (or any LHCb modules for that matter) inside gdb on any lxplus node, you will run into an error like this:

[lxplus223] ~ > gdb python
GNU gdb Red Hat Linux (6.3.0.0-1.162.el4rh)
Copyright 2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
GDB is free software, covered by the GNU General Public License, and you are
welcome to change it and/or distribute copies of it under certain conditions.
Type "show copying" to see the conditions.
There is absolutely no warranty for GDB.  Type "show warranty" for details.
This GDB was configured as "x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu"
   ...Using host libthread_db library "/lib64/tls/libthread_db.so.1".

(gdb) set args test.py
(gdb) run
Starting program:
   /afs/cern.ch/sw/lcg/external/Python/2.5.4p2/slc4_amd64_gcc34/bin/python test.py
[Thread debugging using libthread_db enabled]
[New Thread 182894205120 (LWP 11117)]
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "test.py", line 1, in
    import GaudiPython
ImportError: No module named GaudiPython

Program exited with code 01.
(gdb)

This is due to our group-login script (including the “rc” one)
using LbLogin and that reshuffles the paths. When gdb starts
the process to be debugged and if a SHELL variable is present,
it is started with “$SHELL -c”.
When it is perfectly legal for bash (it only starts a new shell),
with (t)csh it starts a new *login* shell corrupting the already
setup paths (PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, PYTHONPATH etc).

So in order to solve this you have to unset SHELL inside
gdb (maybe best to place that in .gdbinit):

unset environment SHELL