generate_dump—Generate a minidump file containing a snapshot of a running process
generate_dump [OPTION…] PID
Generates a minidump file containing a snapshot of a running process whose process identifier is PID. By default, the target process will be suspended while the minidump is generated, and the minidump file will be written to minidump.PID. After the minidump file is generated, the target process resumes running.
The minidump file will contain information about the process, its threads, its modules, and the system. It will not contain any exception information because it will be generated from a live running process, not as a result of an exception occurring.
On macOS, this program uses task_for_pid() to access the process’ task port. This operation may be restricted to use by the superuser, executables signed by an authority trusted by the system, and processes otherwise permitted by taskgated(8). Consequently, this program must normally either be signed or be invoked by root. It is possible to install this program as a setuid root executable to overcome this limitation, although it will remain impossible to generate dumps for processes protected by System Integrity Protection (SIP), including those whose “restrict” codesign(1) option is respected.
This program is similar to the gcore(1) program available on some operating systems.
-r, --no-suspend
The target process will continue running while the minidump file is generated. Normally, the target process is suspended during this operation, which guarantees that the minidump file will contain an atomic snapshot of the process.
This option may be useful when attempting to generate a minidump from a process that dump generation has an interprocess dependency on, such as a system server like launchd(8) or opendirectoryd(8) on macOS. Deadlock could occur if any portion of the dump generation operation blocks while waiting for a response from one of these servers while they are suspended.
-o, --output=FILE
The minidump will be written to FILE instead of minidump.PID.
--help
Display help and exit.
--version
Output version information and exit.
Generate a minidump file in /tmp/minidump containing a snapshot of the process with PID 1234.
$ generate_dump --output=/tmp/minidump 1234
0
Success.
1
Failure, with a message printed to the standard error stream.
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Copyright 2014 The Crashpad Authors.
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the “License”); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at
http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
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