gprof output not being generated when executed in bash script

Question

I've compiled and linked my application with -pg, and when running the application I get the correct gmon.out file and can analysis it with gprof. I am running a number of scripts under different situations to discover a speed issue between two versions of our software.

When I run the application I do produce the gmon.out output.

Since I have to do this for a number of different scripts, I piled them into a scrip to run so I can take a nap. It's not complicated. I'm also running this script at the same time in another directory with the other version of the application.

./test test1.script
gprof test > test1.ver1.stats
rm -f gmon.out
./test test2.script
gprof test > test2.ver1.stats
rm -f gmon.out

These do not produce the gmon.out file. Is there any explanation to this behavior? Also, running the script without the analysis of the other version running (eg, concatenate the scripts instead of running them in parallel), also produces the same behavior.

Answer 1

The scripts I am using to test the application change directories to get a large data-set. This affected the gmon.out location so when the application exited it was written to that far off directory. As the GNU GProf manual says,

The gmon.out file is written in the program's current working directory at the time it exits. This means that if your program calls chdir, the gmon.out file will be left in the last directory your program chdir'd to. If you don't have permission to write in this directory, the file is not written, and you will get an error message.

Last night I had the scripts running like,

GMON_OUT_PREFIX=test1.ver1.out ./test test1.script
GMON_OUT_PREFIX=test2.ver1.out ./test test2.script
GMON_OUT_PREFIX=test3.ver1.out ./test test3.script

And although, I couldn't find the files in my working directory, I did eventually find the files in the data folder. In the above, it is not important to specify different names for the output since they are proceeded by their process id (like, GMON_OUT_PREFIX.PID), but was necessary in my case to distinguish the tests.