Application disappearing..

[gaf at blu.org (Jerry Feldman)]

In general, there is no way to determine if an appication was killed unless 
it was killed via the sudo command. All the kill command does is to pass 
the kill system call to the kernel with the appropriate signal. An 
application can trap most signals (not 9) and clean itself up, possibly 
without leaving log entries. A well written app will have its own log or 
log the failure to syslog. If an application catches the failure, it can 
exit without leaving a core dump.
FRamsay at castelhq.com wrote:

> I've got a really strange situation, we have had an application that
> stopped running, it either crashed or the PID's were killed.
> Is there any way (from an admin perspecitve) I can tell when processes were
> killed?
> Also is there a way for an application to crash without producing a core?
> ulimit -c returns unlimited for coredump size (and the
> directory has write permission for user who is running the process.)
-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9