Postmortem debugging on AIX

Postmortem debugging is intended to help you isolate the causes of unanticipated traps or unhandled exceptions, in programs that are already in production or widespread use. There are three stages to the postmortem debugging process:

  1. You compile the program with debug information, and ship the resulting object code.
  2. When the end user experiences a trap or unanticipated exception, AIX automatically creates a core dump file with the name core, in the current directory (provided that directory is writable).
  3. You debug the core file instead of a live object code. Because the core file contains information about the state of the application at the time of the trap or exception, and is not a live class file, only a subset of debugger features are available. For example, you can view memory and register contents, but you cannot step or run the program or set breakpoints.