September 2008
Intermediate to advanced
280 pages
6h 31m
English
As mentioned earlier, some signals indicate that it's inadvisable or even impossible for a process to continue. In these cases, the default action is to prematurely terminate the process and write a file called a core file, colloquially known as dumping core. The writing of core files may be suppressed by your shell (see Your Shell May Suppress the Creation of a Core File for details).
If a core file is created during a run of your program, you can open your debugger, say GDB, on that file and then proceed with your usual GDB operations.
A core file contains a detailed description of the program's state when it died: the contents of the stack (or, if the program is threaded, the stacks for each thread), ...