i had some fun trying to figure out why a regular user could not dump a core file and i had all the settings figured out. since it was a silly and obvious thing but it stumped me for a bit i figured it would be worth sharing. :)
the answer is at the end... using Debian testing. i have my kernel boot line set to: systemd.dump_core=true i have these lines in /etc/security/limits.conf: root hard core unlimited root soft core unlimited * soft core unlimited * hard core unlimited i have the following set in my /etc/sysctl.conf: # core file location and file name format kernel.core_pattern=/crash/core.%u.%E.%p if i run a program with a known issue (divide by zero) the core file shows up where it should be if the program is run by root, but not when a normal user runs it. what am i missing or what have i screwed up? root(17)~# ./f Floating point exception (core dumped) root(18)~# ls /crash total 112 -rw------- 1 root root 282624 Feb 28 09:32 'core.0.!root!f.2123' none of my .bashrc/.profile or etc have anything limited in them for core file dumps $ ulimit -a ulimit -a real-time non-blocking time (microseconds, -R) unlimited core file size (blocks, -c) unlimited data seg size (kbytes, -d) unlimited scheduling priority (-e) 0 file size (blocks, -f) unlimited pending signals (-i) 30998 max locked memory (kbytes, -l) 1000392 max memory size (kbytes, -m) unlimited open files (-n) 1024 pipe size (512 bytes, -p) 8 POSIX message queues (bytes, -q) 819200 real-time priority (-r) 0 stack size (kbytes, -s) 8192 cpu time (seconds, -t) unlimited max user processes (-u) 30998 virtual memory (kbytes, -v) unlimited file locks (-x) unlimited turns out it was as simple as the directory permissions on /crash. once i set those to allow the proper access then the crashes would show up. for some reason i thought that a crashing program would have systemd or root handling the saving of the core file and so a user would not need special access to where the core file was landing. $ ls /crash total 228 -rw------- 1 root root 282624 Feb 28 09:48 'core.0.!root!f.2537' -rw------- 1 me me 282624 Feb 28 09:49 'core.1000.!home!me!f.2546' songbird
