DESCRIPTION

     A small number of signals which cause abnormal termination of a process
     also cause a record of the process's in-core state to be written to disk
     for later examination by one of the available debuggers.  (See
     sigaction(2).)  This memory image is written to a file named by default
     core.pid in the /cores directory; provided the terminated process had
     write permission in the directory, and the directory existed.

     The maximum size of a core file is limited by setrlimit(2).  Files which
     would be larger than the limit are not created.

     The core file consists of the ~ Mach-O(5) header as  described in the
     <mach-o/loader.h> file.  The remainder of the core file consists of vari-
     ous sections described in the Mach-O(5) header.

NOTE

     Core dumps are disabled by default under Darwin/Mac OS X.  To re-enable
     core dumps, a privlaged user must edit /etc/hostconfig to contain the
     line:

     COREDUMPS=-YES-

SEE ALSO

     gdb(1), setrlimit(2), sigaction(2), Mach-O(5), sysctl(8)

HISTORY

     A core file format appeared in Version 6 AT&T UNIX.

BSD                             March 18, 2002                             BSD