How to find the reason for a dead process without log file on unix?

Question

This is an interview question.

A developer started a process. But when a customer wants to use the process, he found the process wasn\'t running. The developer logged

Answer 1

Sometimes programs don't create core dumps. In this case knowing the exit code of your software may help.

So you can use this script below to start your software and log its exit status for finding its exit reason.

Example :

#!/bin/bash
./myprogram

#get exit code
exitvalue=$?

#log exit code value to /var/log/messages
logger -s "exit code of my program is " $exitvalue