UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I have come into a business environtment problem and had been 10+ years since the last time I did any unix admin work.

A long time ago some mainframe person created an app that talked to a mainframe on UNIX and wrote a c program with "core" in the file name to indicate that the file was the CORE processing unit. Of course over the last 2 decades this convention has multiplied and multiplied.

Visually when I look at file names both are core.SOMETHING.


I am trying to figure out how to programatically differeniate core dumps from running c programs called core.SomeSequenceOfNumbers whose removal will bring down business for some duration.

Use the "file" command to differentiate the two different file types.

Code:

# which file
/usr/bin/file
# file /var/core/core
/var/core/core:     ELF 64-bit MSB core file SPARCV9 Version 1, from 'crs_stat.bin'
# file /usr/bin/ls
/usr/bin/ls:    ELF 32-bit MSB executable SPARC Version 1, dynamically linked, stripped

The first line above shows where the "file" command is. The second, what an actual core file looks like. The third line is an example of what your compiled C program would look like.


HTH

The "file" test suggested above is very important when dealing with program core dump files, directories called "core*", or files called "core*".
Some systems dump core with a filename core.<pid> where <pid> is the process ID.

Beware that the file containing the text for "man core" is usually called "core.4". Well worth seraching your system to see what variety of filenames you have.

I have seen systems destroyed by deleting the unix "core" package when blindly trying to delete program core dumps.