Recovering a core dump deleted while debugging

[Philippe Blain]

Hi Tom,

> Le 28 août 2026 à 15:23, Tom Tromey <tom@tromey.com> a écrit :
> 
> 
>> 
>> I’m debugging a core dump in GDB and some other process deleted the
>> directory where the core dump was. Is there anyway to recover it?
> 
> Probably not.
> 
>> I tried 'lsof -p $pid' and looking in /proc/$pid/fd/ but the core dump
>> does not appear there. I’m guessing GDB closes the file after it loads
>> everything into memory ?
> 
> BFD sometimes closes file descriptors, so you might have run into this.
> gdb can also cause BFD to do this, though exactly when is kind of opaque
> to the user.
> 
> Checking /proc is pretty much the only thing I would have suggested.

Thank you for answering. Indeed later I tried to continue my GDB session and got a BFD error saying the core was not found. 

Good news is we managed to reproduce and fix the failure leading to the core dump :P

Cheers,

Philippe.