Sensei
writes:
“So you’ve installed the latest bleeding edge Linux distro, or
have been trying out the latest beta release of KDE or Gnome. Now
you’re discovering a multimegabyte file, called “core”, appearing
in your home or root directory. Also known as a core dump file,
they are usually produced when one uses software packages that are
not quite out of the beta testing stage, e.g. bleeding edge desktop
applications.
They are used by the developers for debugging an executable —
finding out information such as, exactly where a program crashed,
the values of various variables, the calling contexts, stack
frames, etc, in order to ascertain the problems and to effect
corrective measures prior to recompilation. One need a debugger to
do this (“gdb”, “ddd” are good ones included in all major
GNU/Linux/BSD distros).” Complete
Story