WCOREDUMPstatus

WCOREDUMPstatus is a term used to describe the interpretation of a process’s termination status with respect to core dumps in Unix-like systems. It centers on the WCOREDUMP macro, defined in sys/wait.h, which tests whether the status value returned by wait or waitpid indicates that a core file was created. Together with other status macros, WCOREDUMPstatus helps determine not only that a process ended abnormally, but whether a core dump was produced for debugging.

How it is used: after a waitpid call returns a status, the macro WIFSIGNALED(status) checks if the child was terminated by a signal. If true, WCOREDUMP(status) will be nonzero if a core dump occurred. If a core dump was produced, you can handle it accordingly; if not, you can report the terminating signal via WTERMSIG(status). Note that WCOREDUMP is meaningful primarily for signaled terminations and may be false if core dumps are disabled or the kernel did not generate one.

Implementation notes: WCOREDUMP is portable across many Unix-like systems that provide the standard wait status macros, but exact behavior can vary by platform. On Linux, core dumps are controlled by user limits (ulimit -c) and by the kernel's core_pattern setting, which determine whether a core file is created and where it is written. In practice, WCOREDUMP(status) assists debuggers and system tools in distinguishing crashes that produce core files from those that do not.

See also:

- waitpid

- WIFSIGNALED

- WCOREDUMP

- WTERMSIG

- core_pattern

- ulimit -c