Obtain Info when a Program Crashes

blb

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

-Rob
 
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.
 

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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...
 
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