Program Crash Data, core.5169 file, how do I read it or find how it was created.

I'm getting a few of these, some are only 500 odd kb, but some are 72Mb.

They reside in root, mainly and sometimes in /

I'm sure these files hold secret answers to the meaning of life, or at least what program crashed and, hopefully, why.

Any tips, ...

Thanks for the response, but I don't know, Which program?

And what will it enable me to learn

Sorry, I didn't mention, KDE 3.5, Mandrive 2006 free, running on an Athlon 3200+, 1024Mb Kingstom ddr400 ram, Gigabyte Ga7N400 MB, ATI 9800 pro 128 Mb. IBM deskstar 40Gb pata, Seagate 120Gb sata.

I don't know the answer because I don't have a core file to play with. The man pages make me think that you could invoke the ddd command with the -c option to name the corefile as follows:

ddd -c core.???

As I say I could be wrong but it's worth a try.

[root@GlennsPref /]# ddd -c core.5169
bash: ddd: command not found
[root@GlennsPref /]# ls -la
total 536
drwxr-xr-x 20 root adm 4096 Jan 10 21:53 ./
drwxr-xr-x 20 root adm 4096 Jan 10 21:53 ../
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 10451 Jan 8 08:45 ATI_LICENSE.TXT
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Jan 10 21:44 .autofsck
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 8 09:33 bin/
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Jan 10 22:22 boot/
-rw------- 1 root root 536576 Jan 10 21:53 core.5169
drwxr-xr-x 26 root root 14960 Jan 10 22:14 dev/
drwxr-xr-x 79 root root 8192 Jan 10 22:01 etc/
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Jan 8 09:00 home/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 7 19:44 initrd/
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Jan 7 16:15 lfs/
drwxr-xr-x 12 root root 4096 Jan 10 21:44 lib/
drwx------ 2 root root 16384 Jan 8 01:31 lost+found/
drwxr-xr-x 9 root root 4096 Jun 16 2005 mnt/
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Jan 8 01:33 opt/
dr-xr-xr-x 101 root root 0 Jan 11 2006 proc/
drwx------ 41 root root 4096 Jan 11 00:22 root/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 8 09:32 sbin/
drwxr-xr-x 10 root root 0 Jan 11 2006 sys/
drwxrwxrwt 9 root root 260 Jan 10 22:22 tmp/
drwxr-xr-x 14 root root 4096 Jan 8 15:11 usr/
drwxr-xr-x 21 root root 4096 Jan 10 19:27 var/
[root@GlennsPref /]#

Alright then, my ddd is located in /usr/bin. You could do a

which ddd

or

locate ddd

or

find / -mount -name ddd

to see if you have this utility.

Anyway it is just a replacement and front end for gdb which is the GNU debugger. The man page for gdb says

gdb [-help] [-nx] [-q] [-batch] [-cd=dir] [-f] [-b bps]
[-tty=dev] [-s symfile] [-e prog] [-se prog] [-c core]
[-x cmds] [-d dir] [prog[core|procID]]

So try this

gdb core.5169

or

gdb -c core.5169

gdb core.5169..."/core.5169": not in executable format: File format not recognized

gdb -c core.5169...Reading symbols from shared object read from target memory...(no debugging symbols found)...done.
Using host libthread_db library "/lib/tls/libthread_db.so.1".
Loaded system supplied DSO at 0xffffe000
Core was generated by `s2u --daemon=yes'.
Program terminated with signal 11, Segmentation fault.
#0 0xb7f38efe in ?? ()
(gdb)

I'm not too sure if this is going in the right direction.

I'm no debugger guru but that output looks very informative to me. It looks like the process that created that core file was running as a daemon. It may have been running an image called s2u, or maybe that is the user account that was running the process. My first guess is that s2u is the name of the binary. The process terminated due to a segmentation fault.

Any more than that would require someone with some experience using the debugger. At least you know that it was a daemon process and terminated due to a segmentation fault. If you want to know more then I think it's time to start reading the GNU Debugger user guide.

OK, I meant I already knew that from the "general backtrace" window that opened.

s2u? I didn't see that. I'll have a search around for it.

I get another one complaining about kicker,

Apparently, kde are aware of the kde 3.5 distro from mandriva is missing some kicker apps. Maybe it all has to do with that.

#!/bin/sh
#---------------------------------------------------------------
# Project : Mandrakelinux
# Module : s2u
# File : hostname-post
# Version : $Id: hostname-post,v 1.4 2005/03/07 16:11:25 fcrozat Exp $
# Author : Frederic Lepied
# Created On : Tue Jul 6 16:10:03 2004
# Purpose : send a dbus message on hostname change to all
# running X11 dbus session.
#---------------------------------------------------------------

dbus-send --system --type=signal /com/mandrakesoft/user com.mandrakesoft.user.message string:"Hostname: $1"

# hostname-post ends here


dbus? that's a daemon isn't it?

Hi

I have the same problem on my system running Mandriva 2007 Free Edition and I have reached the same stage as you in the investigation (!) Assuming it's the right program, I found some info about dbus on http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fdbus. The first few lines are shown below.



D-Bus is a message bus system, a simple way for applications to talk to one another.

D-Bus supplies both a system daemon (for events such as "new hardware device added" or "printer queue changed") and a per-user-login-session daemon (for general IPC needs among user applications). Also, the message bus is built on top of a general one-to-one message passing framework, which can be used by any two apps to communicate directly (without going through the message bus daemon). Currently the communicating applications are on one computer, but TCP/IP option is available and remote support planned.