The default action of certain signals is to cause a process to terminate
and produce a
.IR "core dump file" ,
-a disk file containing an image of the process's memory at
+a file containing an image of the process's memory at
the time of termination.
This image can be used in a debugger (e.g.,
.BR gdb (1))
and is created in the current working directory.
See below for details on naming.)
Writing the core file fails if the directory in which
-it is to be created is nonwritable,
+it is to be created is not writable,
or if a file with the same name exists and
is not writable
or is not a regular file
meaning that the core dump handler needs to use mechanisms to find
the executable name.
.PP
-Instead of being written to a disk file, the core dump is given as
+Instead of being written to a file, the core dump is given as
standard input to the program.
Note the following points:
.IP * 3