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Where the heck is that core dump?

TLDR: Can’t find the core dump even after setting ulimit and looking into apport. Sick of working so hard to get a single backtrace. Questions on the bottom.

I’m having a little nightmare here. I’m currently doing some c coding, which in my case always means a metric ton of segfaults. Most of the times I’m able to reproduce the bug with little to no problem, but today I hit a wall.

My code produces segfaults inconsistently. I need that core dump it is talking about.

So I’m going on a hunt for a core dump, for my little precious a.out. And that is when I’m starting to pull my hair off.

My intuition would tell me, that core dump files should be stored somewhere in the working directory – which obviously isn’t the case. After reading this, I happily typed:

ulimit -c 750000

And… nothing. Output of my program told me that it did the core dump – but I can’t find it in cwd. So after reading this I learnt that I should do things to apport and core_pattern.

Changing core_pattern seems a bit too much for getting one core dump, I really don’t wan’t to mess with it, because I know I will forget about it later. And I tend to mess these things up really badly.

Apport has this magical property of chosing which core dumps are valuable and which are not. It’s logs told me…

ERROR: apport (pid 7306) Sun Jan  3 14:42:12 2016: executable does not belong to a package, ignoring

…that my program isn’t good enough for it.

  1. Where is this core dump file?
  2. Is there a way to get a core dump a single time manually, without having to set everything up? I rarely need those as files per se, GDB alone is enough most of the time. Something like let_me_look_at_the_core_dump <program name> would be great.

I’m already balding a little, so any help would be appreciated.

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Answer

So, today I learnt:

  • ulimit resets after reopening the shell.
  • I did a big mistake in my .zshrc – zsh nested and reopened itself after typing some commands.

After fiddling a bit with this I also found solution to the second problem. Making a shell script:

ulimit -c 750000
./a.out
gdb ./a.out ./core
ulimit -c 0
echo "profit"
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