Micro Focus Visual COBOL 2.3 for Eclipse (UNIX) > Developing Applications in the IDE > Debugging COBOL applications > Debugging Using a Core Dump

Debugging Using a Core Dump

You can arrange for the state of an application to be saved to disk in a core dump file when the application crashes. You can then use the dump file to help debug problems, as it indicates where in the source code the error occurred, along with the values of variables, expressions, and the contents of memory as they were at the moment the error occurred.

You can produce a core dump even when you don't have the COBOL development system installed. This is valuable when you are debugging a released application on site, and you have only the COBOL Server environment installed.

You must have the source files and an .idy file to get the most detail from the core dump. If you do not have the required files, you are given the name of the source file or program where the error occurred.