Re: How do I get a coredump file from an application?

On Wed, Oct 6, 2021 at 11:46 AM Odhiambo Washington wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 5, 2021 at 11:35 PM Tomasz CEDRO wrote:
>> On Mon, Oct 4, 2021 at 9:45 AM Odhiambo Washington wrote:
>> > I have my MTA (Exim) crushing, with the following message in its panic.log:
>> > (...)
>> > I need to obtain a coredump file from the crashing process for debugging
>> > purposes.
>>
>> Have you tried running your application under gdb / lldb?
>
> Nope. Seems rather involving, no?

To read / analyze a core dump you need to use debugger anyway :-)

Question is what you will do with the core dump file, if you want to
send it to someone for analysis then you do not need a debugger just
enable core dump and configure application so it dumps on crash, if
you want to analyze coredump yourself then you will have to use
debugger anyway :-)

Having a core dump is like having a "static" postmortem snapshot of
the application, you cannot do a lot except you perfectly know the
application internals already or you can guess what the problem is
based on backtrace from a generated core dump.

Running application under debugger will bring you to the same point
except you are having control over live application, so you can see
where problem occurred, put a breakpoint in a problematic function,
restart application, then step by step track the problem cause leading
to fix that you can verify at hand straight away yourself :-)

Its not that hard with open source and skillset comes handy in various
situations :-)

Have fun! :-)

-- 
CeDeROM, SQ7MHZ, http://www.tomek.cedro.info