Is Snow Leopard putting the core dump somewhere special?

Question

I'm trying to debug segfault for an application I'm working on (works on Linux, of course, so I cannot use this as a backup for debugging kernel dumps). In any case, I installed "ulimit -c unlimited" and the snow leopard reports "Segmentation error (dropping the kernel)", but, unfortunately, there is no main file that can be found. Does Snow Leopard put them somewhere special or is there some other option that I need to enable? Amazingly little came back when I google this ...

Answer 1

You need to configure launchd so that it actually writes the main dumps. You can find instructions for this at Apple TechNote.

Basically, you need to enable Core Dumps by adding the line:

 limit core unlimited 

into your /etc/launchd.conf file, creating it if necessary, and then reloading.

You can also enable a core dump for a single terminal session by calling:

 ulimit -c unlimited 

before starting the command line application.

You can find kernel dumps in /cores . Be careful, as the main dumps can be large and can easily fill your disk if you do not clean the /cores directory on a regular basis.

Answer 2

This is just a wild hunch, but have you checked /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/ ?