Does anyone know why/how a core dump file (in my case core.770) could be bigger than the file size left on the drive? My core dump was over 1GB and I only have 800MB on that partition. I have a script that runs when a core dumps and it zips it into a tar.gz file. This has always worked correctly. I looked at the core file in a hex editor and it was mostly all zeroes at the end which explains the size. Running gdb didn't seem to get me anywhere so I'm guessing the file is corrupt so I can't see what the problem is with my executable. I'm just wondering how the core size > disk space could even happen. Any thoughts or suggestions are greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Well, I suppose the first point is that a core dump will include the data in memory, rather than the data on the disk, so potentially if your program enters some infinite loop doing some calculation when it shouldn't, there is no particular limit to how much data from disk the core dump could include (perhaps in that case it would be limited to how much RAM you have rather than how much data you have on disk).

Thank you. The RAM on the system is 256MB and the disk space is 800MB. Is there a way that I can make the core readable. By taking out all the xtra zeroes at the end. Is there an end byte for core dumps or something that I could delete everything after in a hex editor? I would love to see the stack in gdb like I usually can see.