Core dumps. How do I make them useful?

[Silent Bob]

I figured this was probably the best place to ask this kind of question.

Basically I was looking to play Maelstrom last night (don't ask) and this program that has worked flawlessly before, segfaulted and dumped core.

I thought this was odd so I su to root and Maelstrom works properly.

This gets me thinking that maybe it's a permission thing so just to check I added another user and logged on as this user. Guess what, Maelstrom runs. This rules out the possibility of being a permission thing.

Anyway my question is, how do I use the core dump to find out what is causing this behaviour?

I've tried trawling the 'net but I can only find information on how to stop core files being written, I can't find any on how to use the core files.

I'd really appreciate it if someone could point me in the right direction.

Thanks

[bwkaz]

gdb (GNU debugger) or ddd (one of the GUI frontends to gdb) can load a core dump, and let you debug the program. It may not tell you anything useful (especially if Maelstrom wasn't compiled with the -g flag for debugging), but it might tell you something. You'll be able to at least see what it was attempting to do.