Core file

[PJSC]

Recently,in our Unix server(HP 9000) some core files frequently appear.To core files,I have four questions.would you please answer them?
1.what is core files?
2.What is the root cause that they bring out?
3.how to treat with it when they occured?
4.By which tools,can we analyse it?

Thanks for your help.

[IT_2007]

try with "file core" to see what type of core file is it? How big is it? If it is OS generated then use "strings core" and may give some information. If it is application generated core file then you need to look at application debugging methods.

[PJSC]

Thanks for you assistance.
If only by core files can we get the result?If we had remove it,what will we do?
If there are some debugging tools to analyse it?

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

1) It is a dump of a process memory image plus some additional data.

2) The root cause could be something as simple as a signal (kill) sent to the process, a memory violation because, for example, the process's stack exceeded the maxssiz kernel parameter but more than likely the cause is a programming error.

3) Fix the underlying problem which generally means a programming change.

4) You first run the file command against the core file and it will identify the executable. Next, you run a debugger against the core file and get a stack trace. Analyzing a stack trace is difficult without the source code. In general, if you have to ask this question then you aren't the one to analyze or fix the problem.