[...]
> I was happily copying some directory structures from one machine to
> another when my FTP client came across a file called 'core' in my
> tomcat's bin directory. This file was (and is) 821,313,536 bytes.
> Anyone have the slightest idea what this file is and how it would grow
> so large?
The so called 'core' file is (assuming we are on Unix/Linux box) a process
memory dump. Probably when you ran Tomcat, due to some JVM low level error,
your system terminated whole process: JVM + Tomcat + Servlets + precompiled
JSP's, and dumped all that data into 'core' file (hence it's big size). You
are (as a every unix sys admin ;) supposed to invoke debugger and see what
the hell is this all about. In practice you can safely remove this core
file, and if you don't want to have such 'surprises' - you can set limit on
core file size to 0, thus getting rid of them ;)) See manual for your
shell, section on limits.
--
Jacek Prucia
7bulls.com S.A.
