Great post on the structure of core files.

It feels like a lot of people have an allergic reaction to core files. (Maybe because they remind you that your program just crashed? Or because they seem to take superhuman understanding to work with?) What's great about them is that they decouple the debugging process from restoring service. In production, when something's broken and you have a hunch will be fine if you restart it, you can save a core file, restart it, restore service, then debug it. In dev and test, when another dev or tester runs into a bug in your area, they can just send you a core file instead of waiting for you to drop everything and debug it right away.