This is a little program which is designed to handle core dumps.

On Linux, if the first character of the /proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern is a pipe symbol (|), the remainder of the line is interpreted as a program to be executed. The core dump is given as standard input to the program. This functionality was implemented in Linux 2.6.19.

Here, we take advantage of this flexibility to implement a few features that are kind of nice to have in a core dump handler. First, we limit the number of core files that can be on disk, deleting ones which are too old. Second, we provide a better notification mechanism than just logging to syslog.

An example usage might look like this: echo "|/usr/bin/handle_core -e %e -d /home/core -m 10" > \ /proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern

I hope this is useful! See COPYING for the license.

regards, Colin McCabe [email protected]