NAME

Devel::CoreDump - create core dumps of the running perl interpreter, without terminating

SYNOPSIS

    use Devel::CoreDump;

    Devel::CoreDump->write('perl.core');

DESCRIPTION

This module allows to create GDB readable coredumps from the running perl interpreter, without terminating execution.

METHODS

get

    my $fh = Devel::CoreDump->get;

Returns a file handle that can be read to obtain a snapshot of the current state of this process. If a core file could not be generated for any reason, an exception is thrown.

This function momentarily suspends all threads, while creating a COW (copy-on-write) copy of the process's address space.

This function is neither reentrant nor async signal safe. Callers should wrap a mutex around the invocation of this function, if necessary.

The current implementation tries very hard to behave reasonably when called from a signal handler, but no guarantees are made that this will always work. Most importantly, it is the caller's responsibility to make sure that there are never more than one instance of get() or write() executing concurrently.

write($file)

    Devel::CoreDump->write('perl.core');

Writes the core file to disk. This is a convenience method wrapping get(). If a core file could not be generated for any reason, an exception is thrown.

AUTHOR

Florian Ragwitz <rafl@debian.org>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright (c) 2008 Florian Ragwitz

This software is distributed under the terms of the BSD License

Parts of this module are taken from Google's coredumper library. http://code.google.com/p/google-coredumper/.

Copyright (c) 2005-2008, Google Inc. All rights reserved.

Coredumper is distributed under the terms of the BSD License.