How to enable full coredumps on OS X?

Question

It looks that OS X (10.6) does not generates codedumps by default.

Using the ulimit -c unlimited is not a good solution because ulimit does set the limit in an environment variable. This will work only for console applications executed from the shell that executed ulimit. If you have a gui application this will not work.

Answer 1

You can enable core dumps and then launch your GUI app from the command line using "open".

$ man open

$ ulimit -c unlimited
$ open /Applications/Address\ Book.app

I just looked at TN2124 and it suggests a similar approach, only without using open and just launching the app directly, e.g.

$ ulimit -c unlimited
$ /Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit