[MPlayer-users] [OT] -- can't make mplayer dump core

[Håkon Alstadheim]

Reimar Doeffinger wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 05:59:58PM +0200, Håkon Alstadheim wrote:
>   
>> I was thinking It was time to start giving something back to mplayer, by 
>> collecting corefiles and backtraces when mplayer says "killed by signal 
>> 11". For the life of me I am unable to get mplayer to produce a core 
>> dump. When i launch bash from the same command-line and do "kill -11 
>> <pid-of-bash>" it says (core dumped), and a file named 
>> core.<pid-of-bash> is there as expected. No such thing with mplayer.
>>
>> I have done "ulimit -c unlimited". There is about 35 Gigs free on the 
>> disk. Current dir is owned and writable by the current user. I've run 
>> versions of mplayer compiled with --enable-debug=1, --enable-debug=3, 
>> and without any --enable-debug. Same same.
>>     
>
> MPlayer has its own signal handler, which contains bug reporting instructions
> and tries to shut down MPlayer cleanly in the cases where it is possible,
> thus no core dump is generated.
> core dumps are almost always completely useless, you can either attach gdb
> beforehand or compile with --enable-crash-debug and run with -crash-debug
> to automatically attach gdb when it crashes (though that has some issues,
> it might leave your terminal unusable).
> _______________________________________________
>   
Ah, OK. This should probably be mentioned in 
DOCS/HTML/en/bugreports_what.html. There is a description of how to get 
a backtrace from a core dump, but no hint that coredumps will not 
normally happen. Your paragraph from above would fit nicely under "A.6.6 
Crashes" I believe. Thanks :-)