Obtain Info when a Program Crashes

[blb]

FYI, there's a program which can be run to gain information if something dies on you. It's called CrashReporter and can be enabled by adding the line

CRASHREPORTER=-YES-

to /etc/hostconfig (then rebooting). If a program crashes, CrashReporter will log (hopefully) useful information in /var/log/crash.log. It appears to dump what caused the crash, as well as stack traces for all threads in the crashing program. Hopefully useful for reporting bugs.

 

[scruffy]

Hey, that is some truly useful information! Thanks.

Now why isn't any of this documented anywhere? Oh, wait, you're going to tell me it is, and I should read the documentation before I go shooting my mouth off...

 

[scruffy]

It should be mentioned that, this being Unix, "reboot" should be considered a sort of obscenity. (People whose installers tell you to reboot are probably just too lazy to write a proper installer...)

you can "sudo /System/Library/StartupItems/CrashReporter/CrashReporter" at a terminal, instead of rebooting.

 

[blb]

I just stumbled onto this one, haven't found any documentation whatsoever concerning it. And about reboots, since X tends more towards the desktop than server side, a reboot shouldn't be all that bad...and I'm lazy.

 

[rharder]

It's interesting to see what else is in that StartupItems folder. I wonder what some of them do.

-Rob

 

[blb]

Going through all the stuff in the StartupItems folder was exactly how I stumbled onto the CrashReporter. The attached startup_items.txt discusses what I found in all the StartupItems folders.

 

[blb]

Note, if you enable the CrashReporter, it doesn't just log some information to /var/log/crash.log, it also causes a core of the application to go into /private/cores. So if disk space seems to be going faster than expected, check there...