crashpad/tools/generate_dump.md
Mark Mentovai 0c41b15496 Convert AsciiDoc documentation to Markdown
Most of the world, including the Chromium universe, seems to be
standardizing on Markdown for documentation. Markdown provides the
benefit of automatic rendering on Gitiles (Gerrit), and on GitHub
mirrors as well. Crashpad should fit in with its surroundings.

There are two quirks that I was unable to resolve.

 - Markdown does not allow **emphasis** within a ```code fence```
   region. In blocks showing interactive examples, the AsciiDoc
   documentation used this to highlight what the user was expected to
   type.
 - Markdown does not have a “definition list” (<dl>). This would have
   been nice in man pages for the Options and Exit Status sections.
   In its place, I used unnumbered lists. This is a little ugly, but
   it’s not the end of the world.

The new Markdown-formatted documentation is largely identical to the
AsciiDoc that it replaces. Minor editorial revisions were made.
References to Mac OS X now mention macOS, and tool man pages describing
tools that that access task ports now mention System Integrity
Protection (SIP).

The AppEngine-based https://crashpad.chromium.org/ app in doc/appengine
is still necessary to serve Doxygen-generated documentation. This app is
updated to redirect existing generated-HTML URLs to Gitiles’ automatic
Markdown rendering.

Scripts in doc/support are updated to adapt to this change. All AsciiDoc
support files in doc/support have been removed.

BUG=crashpad:138

Change-Id: I15ad423d5b7aa1b7aa2ed1d2cb72639eec7c81aa
Reviewed-on: https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/408256
Reviewed-by: Robert Sesek <rsesek@chromium.org>
Reviewed-by: Scott Graham <scottmg@chromium.org>
2016-11-04 21:13:53 +00:00

4.0 KiB
Raw Blame History

generate_dump(1)

Name

generate_dump—Generate a minidump file containing a snapshot of a running process

Synopsis

generate_dump [OPTION…] PID

Description

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.

Options

  • -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.

Examples

Generate a minidump file in /tmp/minidump containing a snapshot of the process with PID 1234.

$ generate_dump --output=/tmp/minidump 1234

Exit Status

  • 0

    Success.

  • 1

    Failure, with a message printed to the standard error stream.

See Also

catch_exception_tool(1)

Resources

Crashpad home page: https://crashpad.chromium.org/.

Report bugs at https://crashpad.chromium.org/bug/new.

Copyright 2014 The Crashpad Authors.

License

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

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an “AS IS” BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.