[techtalk] core file

[Magni Onsoien]

Carolyn Jarie Getter:

> Will someone please clue me in on the "core" files that show up in
> many of my directories.  What are they?  Where do they come from?

Somebody else explained what those files are, so I'll just tell a way to
get rid of them:
add 'ulimit -c 0' to your startup files if you are using bash (.bashrc or
.bash_profile). There is probably a way to do this in other shells to,
but I am using bash so this goes for me :)

If you don't know what they are for, you usually don't need them. But
remember that you'll need them for some debugging purposes, so if you
think you'll need that you shouldn't disable them. 

We have disabled core-files for our 20,000 users and had no complaints -
of course we informed about this, so those who need them just turn them
on by adding 'ulimit -c `some big number of KB`' in their startup-files.
(We disabled them in a global skel-file. We used 'ulimit -Sc 0' there,
to make it a soft limit. If we didn't use the -S-option, it was
interpreted as a hard limit, and thus impossible for our users to
increase.)


Magni :)
-- 
ulimit is good for you.