Dumping core files to some network location

Sometimes during development of software for embedded systems it is desirable to dump core files generated on target device to some network location (the reason may be of that target has non-writable media only, small capacity media or it's more handy to have core files automatically transferred to developer's computer for analysis). Linux kernel 2.6 provides a facility for this, to use it one has to:

write a script that will take core file on its stdin and save it somewhere,
set /proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern to value in form of "|/path/to/coredump_script".

The script can contain something like:

#!/bin/sh
ssh coredump@dumphost "cat > /var/coredump/core.`date +%y%m%d.%H%M%S`"

Note that this script will be called from root user. Also for this to work ssh should be setup to use public key for authentication.

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This page was last modified on 12 Jul 2007