[SWLUG] how hard can it be... to get a core dump

[Justin Mitchell]

On Thu, 2008-09-25 at 15:52 +0100, Mark Summerfield wrote:
> On 2008-09-25, Dave Cridland wrote:
> > On Thu Sep 25 13:18:54 2008, Mark Summerfield wrote:
> > > But programA runs programB and the crash only occurs in programB
> > > when it
> > > is run from programA (with a particular data set); it runs fine on
> > > its
> > > own or with other data. Inside gdb the crash occurs and a return
> > > value
> > > of 01 is noted; but the backtrace gives me nothing, presumably
> > > because
> > > gdb is debugging programA rather than the programB that crashed
> > > "inside"
> > > it.
> >
> > gdb ./programB `pgrep programB`
> >
> > While programB is running, of course.
> >
> > How does programA start?
> 
> The command line is this:
> 
>     $ lout -r6 infile > outfile
> 
> the -r6 says run 6 times. On the 5th run, prg2lout (the program lout
> runs) exits with status 1 (and it shouldn't). Annoyingly if I run
> prg2lout standalone it works okay, and if I do -r4 and then -r2
> everything works fine.

um, perhaps it isnt actually crashing at all.
that exit code of 1 is probably just that, an exit code of 1.
what that means is entirely upto the program.

which would explain why you cant get a core dump.