For the diminishing number of us who are still occasionally inspired or required to debug code involving AppleEvents, a lot of the head-scratching revolves around the question “what the heck is this AEDesc”?

The question is especially likely to come up when poking around in the debugger at some code you probably didn’t write, don’t have the source code for, and was not compiled with symbols of any kind. For example, you’re wondering why the heck an AppleScript behaves one way when run by your app, but another way when run in the Script Editor, or in an iWork app.

In the old days, a convenient system function could solve this problem for us: AEPrintDesc. You passed it an AEDesc, it printed out junk about it. Perfect for debugging in a command-line debugger. For example, if a pointer to an AEDesc was in register $rdi:

(lldb) expr (void) AEPrintDesc($rdi)

Unfortunately this disappeared at some point, leaving only the much less interactive AEPrintDescHandle. Not to fear, you can still make use of this from the debugger, you just have to take advantage of lldb’s ability to spontaneously generate runtime variables:

(lldb) expr void *$h = (void*)malloc(sizeof(void*))
(lldb) expr (void) AEPrintDescToHandle($rdi, &$h)
(lldb) expr *(char**)$h

But when one is head-down, debugging a serious AppleEvent issue, it’s not uncommon to need to print AEDescs left, right, up, down, and diagonally. This needs to be fast-and-furious, not daunting, slow, and error-prone. I decided to use this problem to dig into lldb’s user commands functionality. I thought at first that “command alias” would do the trick, because it shows examples of defining an alias that takes arguments from the command line and passes them along:

(lldb) command alias pdesc expr void* $h = (void*)malloc(8); (void) AEPrintDescToHandle(%1, &$h); *(char**)$h/
(lldb) pdesc $rdi
error: expected expression
error: invalid operands to binary expression ('char *' and 'unsigned long')
error: 2 errors parsing expression

The trick, as I finally learned from the lldb blog, is you have to use a special “regex” form of command if you want to properly expand arbitrary input and run whatever debugger expressions on it:

(lldb) command regex pdesc 's/(.+)/expr void* $h = (void*)malloc(8); (void) AEPrintDescToHandle(%1, &$h); *(char**)$h/'

Now when I’m stuck in the mines hammering on AEDescs, I just type “pdesc [whatever]”, and if it’s an AEDesc, I get an instantly readable result:

(lldb) pdesc $rdi
(char *) $10 = 0x00007fc3c360c0d0 "'Jons'\\'pClp'{ '----':\"file:///\", &'subj':null(), &'csig':65536 }"
(lldb) pdesc $rsi
(char *) $11 = 0x00007fc3c3626940 "'aevt'\\'ansr'{  }"

To enjoy the benefits of this command in whatever process you’re debugging, whether it’s yours, the system’s, or a 3rd-party app’s code, just add the line as-is to your ~/.lldbinit file:

command regex pdesc 's/(.+)/expr void* $h = (void*)malloc(8); (void) AEPrintDescToHandle(%1, &$h); *(char**)$h/'

Enjoy!

Update: Chris Parrish on Twitter informs me that the debugger function is still present, but it’s named differently than I remember. It’s GDBPrintAEDesc. Oh well, at least this was a good learning experience!

Update 2: Poking around a bit more in the debugger, I noticed a helpful looking function:

(lldb) expr (void) GDBPrintHelpDebuggingAppleEvents()

Run that from lldb and see a round-up of information about the GDBPrintAEDesc call and other debugging tricks provided by the AppleEvent engineers.