What is the correct way to force an app to core dump and quit?

Question

I just came across some code which used the kill system call to send a SIGSEGV signal to an app. The rationale behind this was that this would force the app to core dump and

Answer 1

If you want to make an application dump it's core from another program, pretty much the only way to do it is via a signal. SEGV would be fine for this. Alternatively you can hook a debugger up to the program and freeze it and view it's registers and such without killing it.

If you want to dump a core from within an application there are nicer ways to do it, like via an assert().

So, no, it's not particularly wrong to send a SEGV to a program. You could also send things like SIGILL for illegal instruction, or a divide by zero signal. It's all fine.