Little bombs at Home...

miclem · 01-16-2005, 02:25 PM

Helloo! Hope someone can put my mind at rest... I've been using Gnome2.6 on mandrake10.1 OE, and every and then i'm getting a little bomb icon appear in my Home file, with 'core.' followed by a set of numbers anywhere from 4 to 6 digits long.

Can someone please tell me what they mean, and what should be done with them? I've been moving them straight to the wastebasket and deleting them. Am I a fool, or am I right to do this?

Any feedback greatly appreciated!

mimithebrain · 01-16-2005, 02:40 PM

sure, delete them...

it's just when an app crashes or an error or something.

I'm not sure myself... I think I get these after playing BZflag I think...

after deleting them, they never did any harm in return...

Tinkster · 01-16-2005, 02:45 PM

core files are indeed dumps... they contain debug
information which may be useful for the developer
of the program (or yourself if you're a coder and
want to know why your app crashes) ... to a normal
user they're irrelevant and can be deleted.

Cheers,
Tink

miclem · 01-17-2005, 07:12 AM

Thanks for the speedy replies and reassurance. I thought it'd be something like that, but just wanted to be sure...!

frob23 · 01-17-2005, 07:25 AM

If you are not a coder and know you will always delete them. Save yourself some time and add the following line to either ~/.profile or ~/.bash_profile (whichever you have already)

ulimit -S -c 0 > /dev/null 2>&1

This makes the core file size limit zero and deletes the empty files. If you want this to be the default reaction for the entire system just add it to "/etc/profile"