IDA Pro debugger hit counter

Question

I'm looking for a way to found out how many times instruction at specified address was executed before break point hit.

Is there some standard way? I cannot found this in its interface.

Answer 1

Disclaimer: I don't have IDA available to try it out right now, so a detail might be wrong.

Just add some code to the breakpoint condition. For example

extern bpcount;
bpcount++;
Message(form("%d. hit\n"), bpcount);
return (bpcount>500);

This will increment the count each time the breakpoint is it, but only break the program after more than 500 hits. Replace the return instruction with return 0 if you never want to break, or return 1 if you always want to break.

Answer 2

Apparently IDA 7.0 (and earlier?) supports a "pass count" for a breakpoint, you can even see a column for that in the breakpoint list window, but I found no way to configure it via the UI.

You can use the following Python commands to create a breakpoint with a pass count though, where 0x12345678 is the address at which you want to set it, and 42 the hit count:

add_bpt(0x12345678, 1, BPT_DEFAULT)
set_bpt_attr(0x12345678, BPTATTR_COUNT, 42)

Answer 3

I have added Python script on a breakpoint.

f = open('C:\\Users\\T3\\Desktop\\Count.txt', 'r+')
strData = f.readline()
n = int(strData)
n = n + 1
f.seek(0)
f.write(str(n))
f.close()
return 0

Count file at the beginning contained 0 but after execution it contains hit count.

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This way has one drawback. File IO is slow, so registry counters may be used because it is stored in memory (that is only for Windows).