Handling *.core files

[balanga]

I have numerous *.core files all over my system and have no intention of looking at them since I have no idea what to look for.

For some reason I believed that PERIODIC deleted them after some period.

Do I understand this correctly? And if so do I need to enable deletion of these files.

I've looked into the documentation but I must be missing something since they are not getting deleted.

 

[nxjoseph]

I couldn't find a periodic cronjob that can delete .core files on my system. There are ways to prevent dumping of .core files, though. I use kern.corefile=/dev/null in /etc/sysctl.conf.

 

[cracauer@]

Use `ulimit -c 0` in your shells to not have them in the first place.

 

[balanga]

I keep getting a /at-spi-bus-launcher.core.

Anyone know what is causing this?

 

[atax1a]

the at-spi-bus-launcher process, clearly.

the fact that this is in the root directory implies that it's running as root. are you running your desktop environment as root? :S

 

[atax1a]

I couldn't find a periodic cronjob that can delete .core files on my system. There are ways to prevent dumping of .core files, though. I use kern.corefile=/dev/null in /etc/sysctl.conf.

/etc/defaults/periodic.conf says daily_clean_disks_files="[#,]* .#* a.out *.core *.CKP .emacs_[0-9]*" but this requires, i think, that you enable daily_clean_disks_enable="YES" in /etc/periodic.conf — this is probably the cronjob that the OP was referring to.

 

[Charlie_]

I use kern.corefile=/dev/null in /etc/sysctl.conf.

kern.coredump=0 in /etc/sysctl.conf.

 

[PMc]

Even if I do not intend to read *.core files, I still want to see them, because they show something is malfunctioning. So I send all the *.core files to a common place where I can find them, like so (in /etc/sysctl.conf):
kern.corefile=/var/tmp/%N.%U.%P.%I.core

 

[nxjoseph]

/etc/defaults/periodic.conf says daily_clean_disks_files="[#,]* .#* a.out *.core *.CKP .emacs_[0-9]*" but this requires, i think, that you enable daily_clean_disks_enable="YES" in /etc/periodic.conf — this is probably the cronjob that the OP was referring to.

Ah, i might have missed this path with my grep(1)...