A core dump is a on disk representation of a state of a user space application at the time of its abnormal termination. Core dumps can be used to diagnose the cause of a crash of an application.
Core dumps are not useful to end users, as they require specialised skills to analyze and determine the cause of the crash. In most cases, enabling a core dump is not necessary until there is a specific need.
In Red Hat Enterprise Linux, core file creation is disabled for interactive shells. This is configured in the /etc/profile by theulimit command.
The /etc/profile contains system wide environment variables and commands that will be run for any interactive shell. By default, it contains this line:
ulimit -S -c 0 > /dev/null 2>1
To enable core dumps for interactive or non-daemon programs, change this line to:
ulimit -S -c unlimited >/dev/null 2>1
This will allow all users to produce core files with no upper size limit.
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