College of Engineering & CS Wright State University Dayton, Ohio 45435-0001

CEG 333: Introduction to Unix Prabhaker Mateti Core Dumps

A core dump is a file containing the memory of a running program which has just crashed. It may be saved as "program.core" or simply "core"

The allowed size of a core dump is set with the ulimit -c command. Usually dumping is disabled by setting this maximum to 0. To enable saving cores, use a large value instead, for example ulimit -c 1000.

Why is this useful? GDB can load core files: gdb PROGRAM CORE. From there, the debugger can help find the bug as if it had been running the program directly.