Technical Notes

Some signals, such as SIGQUIT, SIGBUS, and SIGSEGV, produce a core dump. See the signal(5) man page for a complete list.

If you have the source code for the program, you can try compiling it with cc -g, and debugging it yourself using dbx or a similar debugger. The where directive of dbx provides a stack trace.

On mixed networks, it can be difficult to discern which machine architecture produced a particular core dump, since adb(1) on one type of system generally cannot read a core(4) file from another type of system, and will produce an "unrecognized file" message. Run adb(1) on various machine architectures until you find the right one.

The term "core" is archaic-- ferrite core memory was supplanted by silicon RAM in the 1970s, although spaceships still employ core memory for its imperviousness to radiation.