I said:
> "Tim Lynch" <admin+pgsqladmin@thirdage.com> writes:
>> i don't see a core file.
> Check that you are starting the postmaster with "ulimit -c unlimited";
> this is not the default on most Linuxen, so you may have to add that to
> the start script. Also note that the postmaster never does a chdir,
> so if it drops core it will be in the same directory the start script
> was running in.
Drat, I forgot to mention an important corollary: make sure the
postmaster is started in a directory that's writable by the postgres
user, else you'll get no corefile.
(For completeness I'll mention here that when individual backends dump
core, it's in the $PGDATA/base/nnn/ directory of the database they're
connected to. So you can easily distinguish a postmaster core from
a backend core, just by where it was dropped.)
regards, tom lane