What is a good way to dump a Linux core file from inside a process?

Question

We have a server (written in C and C++) that currently catches a SEGV and dumps some internal info to a file. I would like to generate a core file and write it to disk at th

Answer 1

I assume you have a signal handler that catches SEGV, for example, and does something like print a message and call _exit(). (Otherwise, you'd have a core file in the first place!) You could do something like the following.

void my_handler(int sig)
{
   ...
   if (wantCore_ && !fork()) {
      setrlimit(...);  // ulimit -Sc unlimited
      sigset(sig, SIG_DFL);  // reset default handler
      raise(sig);  // doesn't return, generates a core file
   }
   _exit(1);
}