UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

All,

Remotely logged in to the UNIX server (HP B1000 Visual Server)
(Version HP-UX 10.20) by using the program Xapplauncher.
This is a application runs under Exceed.
(Exceed "version 6.1" is a Windows application to communicate with UNIX servers)

With no pre warnings the application was terminated and the connection to the UNIX server was disconected.
As a result of this a "core" file was created on the UNIX server.

Since this is not the first time this happened I would like to decode the "core" file to hopefully find out why this happened.

A quick search on the WEB did not give me any directions where to find such a decoder tool.

Who can help me getting the core decoder tool for HP-UX 10.20,
so I can read the core file and understand what is wrong.

Thanks,

Paul

Please do state your OS and its Version. If Possible Error message of your System Crash (If You wanted to troubleshoot before taking other action).

On HP-UX 10.20 the "file" command can tell you a little bit about the core file:
> file core
core: core file from 'sleep' - received SIGQUIT

That is the output I get from a core file that I intentionally created. And it's right, I did a "sleep 500" and then I sent a quit signal to the process.

To take it further, I would need to use a debugger. Usually that implies that the program needed to be built in a special way to enable the use of a particular debugger.

I could always do something like:
adb /usr/bin/sleep core
but this will be very rough since the sleep program has been stripped. adb, like all debuggers, is an interactive program. Knowing how to use it will require a lot of assembly language knowledge.

A core file is (basicly) the data and stack segments of the process. You can use programs like "strings" and "od" on it if you're looking for something in particular.