Using core files - machinekoder/asciidoc-sandbox GitHub Wiki

Every once in a while when you are developing stuff some application might crash. This can be especially annoying with race conditions or other types of bugs that appear rarely and usually your are not debugging the application when they occur. For this purpose Linux has a feature calle coredump. A coredump can be created automatically if you enable it.

This is simple. Just run ulimit -c unlimited to enable core dumps of unlimited size. The default is usually 0.

First you have to figure out which application caused the core dump. Usually the last line of the core dump file contains the name o the application:

 strings <corefilename> | tail -n 1

Now you need to use gdb to read the core file

 gdb <executable> <corefilename>