Solved Is it possible to disable coredumps on a per-command basis?

[Dan Barowy]

I have a program (not written by me) that works as expected, except that it segfaults and dumps core just before exiting. This problem will eventually be fixed, but for now, I would like to use this program without sprinkling `.core` files everywhere. Can I disable core dumps on a per-process basis? Ideally, it would look something like this:

$ COREDUMP=/dev/null ./bad_program

In particular, I do not want to globally disable core dumps, as I would like to have them around for other processes. I just want to disable them for this command.

 

[Mjölnir]

I guess this is possible with resource limits rctl(8). EDIT or ugidfw(8)

 

[mark_j]

You can use limit in tcsh/csh/zsh, but it will last for the session you're in.
If you can, why not wrap the program in a shell script and set limit in it?

 

[Bobi B.]

As mark_j said, something like

#!/bin/sh
ulimit -c 0 # prevents core dump files from being created
exec /path/to/your/program "$@"

 

[mark_j]

Yes something like that, or limit coredumpsize 0

 

[Dan Barowy]

Wow, thank you all for the help! Bobi's script is exactly what I was looking for.