Hi Neil, On Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 4:59 PM, Neil Horman <nhorman@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > On Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 02:09:14PM +0200, Michael Kerrisk wrote: > > Andi -- ping! > > > > Adding Neil to CC, since it looks like he also did some work here, and > > so can perhaps comment. > > > > On Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 6:53 PM, Michael Kerrisk > > <mtk.manpages@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > Andi, > > > > > > I wrote the following description of the core_pattern pipe feature. Does this > > > seem okay? > > > > > > Piping core dumps to a program > > > Since kernel 2.6.19, Linux supports an alternate syntax > > > for the /proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern file. If the first > > > character of this file is a pipe symbol (|), then the > > > remainder of the line is interpreted as a program to be > > > executed. Instead of being written to a disk file, the > > > core dump is given as standard input to the program. > > > Note the following points: > > > > > > * The program must be specified using an absolute path- > > > name (or a pathname relative to the root directory, > > > /), and must immediately follow the '|' character. > > > > > > * The process created to run the program runs as user > > > and group root. > > > > > > * Arguments can be supplied to the program, delimited by > > > white space (up to a total line length of 128 bytes). > > > > > > Cheers, > > > > > > Michael > > > > Thanks for CC'ing me. The above all looks good. I would add documentation > however, about the available macros that can be used when core_pattern is > specified as a pipe. Adding something like the following would be good: > > * Arguments can be statically declared or implied via the use of macros, > denoted by the use of the %sign. The following macros are supported: > * %% - output a literal % sign on the command line > * %p - the pid of the crashing process > * %u - the uid of the crashing process > * %g - the gid of the crashing process > * %s - the signal that caused the crashing process to crash > * %t - the time the crashing process dumped > * %h - the hostname of the system > * %e - the executable name of the crashing process > * %c - the core limit size of the crashing process Thanks for pointing that out! I'll note it in the page. > Note that the core limit size macro may be a different value than what > is returned by getrlimit(RLIMIT_CORE,...). This is due to the fact > that the core_pattern specified executible will be run as the same uid > as the crashing process, and to facilitate reception of the entire > core, the kernel will temporarily set RLIMIT_CORE to unlimited while > the dump is in progress. Actually, I can't seem to get an example of this behavior. In my experiments, %c always seems to give the "right" info (i.e., I don't ever see %c showing 2^32 (unlimited) when I set a soft limit). Can you show a specific case where it doesn't give the "right" value? > Note also %u and %g may be different values > than getuid/getgid in the event that the core_pattern executable is > set[u|g]id root I'm slightly confused by that last point. According to my experiments, the core_pattern executable is always run as user and group root, so making it set[ug]id root would seem to be a no-op. (But anyway, %u and %g do give the "right" values -- the UID and GID of the dumping process.) Cheers, Michael -- Michael Kerrisk Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/ Found a bug? http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/reporting_bugs.html -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-man" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
