My R session crashed with this:
Process R segmentation fault (core dumped) at Tue Jan 6 11:29:24 2015
I'm running R 3.1.2 on Ubuntu 13.10 (yes I need to upgrade). I'm not worried about the crash, but I want to find the core dump. It's not in the R working directory, it's not in /var/crash or /var/cache, and I don't know where else to look.
On edit: my /proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern reads |/usr/share/apport/apport %p %s %c. apport doesn't have a man page, but I can google it, and it looks like it's supposed to write the core to /var/crash, but it's not there. Could R be overriding the default core dump behavior?
Read core(5). On some Linux, name and location of core is configurable thru proc(5), e.g. with /proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern. See also setrlimit(2) (so, your shell's ulimit builtin). Check that your core limit is a few hundred megabytes at least.
BTW, you could write into that core_pattern file and repeat the offending R session.