Had my first crash or whatever this is

[gore]

I had a problem earlier when i was trying to read a floppy disk and i dont know if thats when this was added but now theres a file with a bomb icon in my home directory called core. It says "core. program crash data" when i move my mouse over it.


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What do you all think? I mean what happened? What should i Do?


EDIT: Deleted core dump data. And thank you everyone for the help, and special thanks to slarity for the "hey idiot dont post that kinda data" ;)

[Lucas420]

Gore, my bad a about Suse earlier, I just didn't know what it was. But anyways, I'n not sure what you should do, as I said earlier I'm not good at linux.

Madman

[MemorY]

Gore, my bad a about Suse earlier

shouldnt you be posting this in the thread about SUSE ???

gore by the looking at the code i can only guess it's a IRC patch, script or a nuke add-on for IRC .... doesnt sound dangerous to me .... any other guesses or .....

i guees that was what you thought it was ... just my opinion

[gore]

Iv just never encountered a crash in Linux and i dont really know what to do. I mean do i just delete the core crash fle and pretend it didnt happen or is something now wrong with my box now or what?

[whistlersec]

Fellas, long time reader, first time poster. That my friends is a core dump. Nothing else,
no irc trojan, worm, etc. Basically what that is: you know if netscape etc crashes they want you to send the developers a file over the net, so they can correct the problem. Well, a core dump is the same thing, except you get to fix it heheh...heres a link:http://startlinux.co.nz/articles/article_153.php

[slarty]

Yes, it's a core dump. You cannot understand it with a text editor *nor can we*.

Please edit the above post to remove the thousands of lines of gibberish.

You can use gdb to read core dumps

gdb <name of executable> <core dump>

and then gdb behaves as if the program had been stopped at that point (although I don't think you can continue it). You can examine variables etc.

By the way, posting core dumps is a risky business, you should generally avoid it. As you can see, it contains any of the program's data at the moment it crashed.

I'm guessing that the process was an IRC client. However in principle people can get privileged information out of a core dump (although not so easily if it's been mangled by an AO post)

[the_JinX]

I agree with slarty..

100% the core dumps usualy don't contain anything usefull, but they can contain anything from passwords to creditcard numbers to your dear dear diary..

Those core dumps are only realy usefull while debugging software, but they do look cool on SuSE !!

[SirDice]

Those icons are generated by GNOME. So they will look cool on any unix running the GNOME desktop And yes, they're only useful when debugging.