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

[Reimar Doeffinger]

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).