Where’s my Core Dump?

In the old days, the most dreaded message on a Unix system was segmentation fault: core dumped. In the case where it was your program that dumped, you then had to fire up adb and pour over the registers and the stack, cross referencing with the assembly language produced by your compiler. Things got a lot better with symbolic debuggers like gdb, then even better with graphical front ends like ddd. But one thing remained constant: the need for the core file, the snap shot of the process at the moment it died.

Unfortunately, as computers got more powerful, cores got bigger. Dumping them can take significant time, and they typically drop in the directory containing the program that dumped, eating up disk space and needing to be cleaned up. In recent years, this has led to Linux distributions disabling core dumps by default. That’s great until you actually need to debug a program. Then you need to turn them on by running:

ulimit -c unlimited

This can be done in a terminal window for a single session, in ~/.bashrc to make it the default for you, or, if you have sudo privileges, in /etc/profile to make it the default for all users.

Here’s an article with some more details: How To Enable Core Dumps