How Auto Bug Report Tool (ABRT) works in order to catch cores at the runtime?

My fedora12 installed a tool called ABRT that comes probably with GNOME. This tool operates at the background and reports at realtime any process that has crashed.

I have used a signal handler that was able to catch a SIGSEGV signal, ie it could report crashed.

What other ways exist in order a process to get information about the state (especially a core) of an other process without having parent-child connection?

Any ideas? It seems a very intere开发者_Go百科sting issue.

ABRT is open source, after all, so why not look at their code. The architecture is explained here -- it looks like they monitor $COREDUMPDIR to detect when a new core file appears.

Your question is not entirely clear, but it is possible to get a core of a running process using gcore:

gcore(1)                           GNU Tools                          gcore(1)

NAME
       gcore - Generate a core file for a running process

SYNOPSIS
       gcore [-o filename] pid

DESCRIPTION
       gcore  generates  a  core file for the process specified by its process
       ID, pid. By default, the core file is written to core.pid, in the  cur‐
       rent directory.

       -o filename
              write core file to filename instead of core.pid