Generating core dumps in el capitan

Core dumps definitely work in 10.11 but there’s a couple of gotchas with the examples in TN2124:

• the listings have been munged by our web publishing system )-:

• the example app, TextEdit, no longer works because of System Integrity Protection

However, the basic approach still works just fine; you just have to target a non-Apple application. For example, here’s me picking on TextWrangler:

$ sw_vers
ProductName:    Mac OS X
ProductVersion: 10.11.3
BuildVersion:  15D21
$ ls -lh /cores
$ # nothing there
$ ulimit -c unlimited
$ /MyApplications/TextWrangler.app/Contents/MacOS/TextWrangler
… waiting for the kill …
Abort trap: 6 (core dumped)
$ ls -lh /cores
total 1196480
-r--------  1 quinn  admin  584M 18 Mar 10:11 core.25815

where you send the kill command as follows:

$ killall -ABRT TextWrangler

Please do file a bug against the doc. TN2124 desperately needs an update. Once we perfect the DTS Engineer Cloning Programme™, I’ll get right on that!

Share and Enjoy
—
Quinn “The Eskimo!”
Apple Developer Relations, Developer Technical Support, Core OS/Hardware

let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@apple.com"

I'm working on a non-apple business app which will not be running from a terminal. Trying your example works, but if I don't execute it from the terminal then it does not produce core dumps. How do I enable it such that I get it when random crash happens.

Thank you! this works for me. Its' very helpful.

Is there any hint (or supported API) for doing the inverse?

That is, to hinder someone disassembling, say, my receipt validation code, or looking at sensitive data in my process, I want to disable core dumps for my process.

Would installing an empty signal handler for SIGABRT do that?

Is there any hint (or supported API) for doing the inverse?

What you’re asking for amounts to DRM, which isn’t something that DTS supports officially, thus my answers will be limited.

The obvious answer here is to do the reverse of what I suggested to ambreen2006: in

main

setrlimit

RLIMIT_CORE

You might also want to look into the

ptrace

PT_DENY_ATTACH

Would installing an empty signal handler for SIGABRT do that?

No.

SIGABRT

Share and Enjoy
—
Quinn “The Eskimo!”
Apple Developer Relations, Developer Technical Support, Core OS/Hardware

let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@apple.com"

Thanks, Quinn! Adding your answer to things I might try in the future.

What you’re asking for amounts to DRM, which isn’t something that DTS supports officially, thus my answers will be limited.

IMHO, this is more akin to code obfuscation, recommended by Apple for receipt checking; but, no problem.

IMHO, this is more akin to code obfuscation, recommended by Apple for receipt checking; but, no problem.

Hey, DTS doesn’t support code obfuscation either (-:

To clarify, there are plenty of places that Apple uses DRM, and some of those extend to our third party partners (the App Store being one obvious example, but there are others, like FairPlay Streaming). DTS does support those technologies as a whole. What DTS doesn’t support is the development of custom DRM schemes.

Of course, the fact that DTS doesn’t support something doesn’t stop you from doing it. We’re not App Review (-:

Share and Enjoy
—
Quinn “The Eskimo!”
Apple Developer Relations, Developer Technical Support, Core OS/Hardware

let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@apple.com"