savecore —
"save a core dump of the operating system"
SYNOPSIS
savecore
-csavecore
[-fvz]
[-N system]
directory
DESCRIPTION
savecore
copies the currently running kernel and its associated core dump into
directory,
and enters a reboot message and information about the core dump into
the system log.
The options are as follows:
-c
Clears the dump, so that future invocations of
savecore
will ignore it.
-f
Forces a dump to be taken even if the dump doesn't appear correct or there
is insufficient disk space.
-N system
Use
system
as the kernel instead of the default
/bsd.
-v
Prints out some additional debugging information.
-z
Compresses the core dump and kernel (see
compress(1/)).
savecore
checks the core dump in various ways to make sure that it is current and
that it corresponds to the currently running system.
If it passes these checks, it saves the core image in
directory
and the system in
directory
(or in
directory
and
directory,
respectively, if the
-z
option is used).
The
“#”
is the number from the first line of the file
directory,
and it is incremented and stored back into the file each time
savecore
successfully runs.
savecore
also checks the available disk space before attempting to make the copies.
If there is insufficient disk space in the filesystem containing
directory,
or if the file
directory
exists and the number of free kilobytes (for non-superusers) in the
filesystem after the copies were made would be less than the number
in the first line of this file, the copies are not attempted.
If
savecore
successfully copies the kernel and the core dump, the core dump is cleared
so that future invocations of
savecore
will ignore it.
savecore
is meant to be called near the end of the initialization file
/etc/rc
(see
rc(8/)).