You may want to stop into the debugger if something bad happened while executing your program. The easier way to do that is to have a breakpoint always set and to run your program in the debugger.
But sometimes you want to break even if there are no breakpoint. For example you know that something is wrong now and your program will crash later.
When debugging your application, you use breakpoints. The program will return control to GDB every time it reaches a breakpoint you set. This may not be desirable if you have breakpoint on a method that is called many times and you want to break only with certain values passed to that method. GDB provides several ways to do conditional breakpoints that I’ll try to explain.