[Openmcl-devel] Every C-\ creates a crash report

[Gary Byers]

On Thu, 15 Apr 2010, Leo wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I wonder if developers are aware of this.
>
> To exist ccl, I often press C-\. But I just found out it creates a crash
> log for every use (See: ~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports:). Is this a
> recommended way to exit ccl or a bug?
>

Neither.  C-\ on a terminal device generates a SIGQUIT signal, which
causes "abnormal termination" of the process that controls the terminal.
On some systems and with some resource limits in effect, this will generate
a core file which can be used for debugging; on Snow Leopard, when the
"coredumpsize" resource limit is 0 on 10.6.3 (at least), a file is written
to ~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports.  (Among other things, that file will
note that SIGQUIT was the cause of the abnormal termination.)

None of this has anything to do with CCL.  (Run - oh, I don't know, "cat" -
in a terminal window, type a C-\ while it's sitting there waitin to read
something from stdin, and look for the "DiagnosticReport".)

It's possible that the generation of the text file is new in 10.6.3,
but using a keystroke that's defined to cause "abrupt/abnormal
termination, with possible core dump or other diagnostic output"
doesn't sound like a good way to exit CCL or any program, unless you
want that behavior.  (Aside from generating unwanted diagnostic output,
it keeps the program's threads from shutting down in an orderly manner.)
If you've just somehow gotten into the habit of exiting from programs in
this way, that might be a good habit to get out of.

(If you type a ^T to a program running in a terminal, it'll ordinarily
print some information about the program and system performance; if you
type a ^C, the program will receive an "interrupt" signal, and rather
than listen to someone enumerate the process control and simple editing
functions that're built in to the tty driver and the characters that invoke
those functions, you can do "stty -a" to see for yourself.)





> I am using Clozure Common Lisp Version 1.5-dev-r13620M-trunk
> (DarwinX8664) on Snow Leopard 10.6.3.
>
> Thanks.
>
> Leo
>
> -- 
> H A P P Y  H O L I D A Y S!
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