Usage

Command line

When crash is detected on a headless machine abrt notifies user via email or console notification, see Server or headless machine.

To list all crashes on a machine run:

abrt-cli list

Example output:

id 58101e309c3e473d49b1a7d60868ab7023a62dd6
reason:         will_abort killed by SIGABRT
time:           Wed 17 Sep 2014 03:24:07 AM CEST
cmdline:        will_abort
package:        will-crash-0.7-4.fc21
uid:            1000 (mhabrnal)
count:          1
Directory:      /var/spool/abrt/ccpp-2014-09-17-02:51:07-5368

id 58101e309c3e473d49b1a7d60868ab7023a62dd6
reason:         will_abort killed by SIGABRT
time:           Wed 17 Sep 2014 02:51:07 AM CEST
cmdline:        will_abort
package:        will-crash-0.7-4.fc21
uid:            1000 (mhabrnal)
count:          1
Directory:      /var/spool/abrt/ccpp-2014-09-17-02:51:07-5368
Reported:       cannot be reported

id afdf8c42ddeb324b975f3510f6e976085b46c4fe
reason:         will_segfault killed by SIGSEGV
time:           Tue 16 Sep 2014 11:12:09 PM CEST
cmdline:        will_segfault
package:        will-crash-0.7-4.fc21
uid:            1000 (mhabrnal)
count:          1
Directory:      /var/spool/abrt/ccpp-2014-09-16-23:12:09-4265
Reported:       https://retrace.fedoraproject.org/faf/reports/bthash/102f484335e2df215da7a92d962d017e7d9edcc9
                https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1124867

Displayed are three crashes collected by abrt. Each crash has an identifier and a directory that can be used for further manipulation using abrt-cli. The second crash (from the above example) cannot be reported. Run abrt-cli info -d $ID to see why the problem cannot be reported.

To display detailed report about particular problem use:

abrt-cli list -d <ID_OR_PATH>

To report a problem via abrt-cli use:

abrt-cli report <ID_OR_PATH>

To delete a problem run:

abrt-cli remove <ID_OR_PATH>

For more details consult man abrt-cli.

Selecting a preferred text editor

During the reporting process abrt-cli report will open a text editor. It uses the editor defined in $ABRT_EDITOR environment variable. If the variable is not defined, it checks the $VISUAL and $EDITOR variables. If none of these variables is set, vi is used.

You can set the preferred editor in your .bashrc configuration file. For example, if you prefer GNU Emacs, add the following line to the file:

export EDITOR=emacs

Graphical user interface

After a crash is handled by ABRT user is presented with a notification with options to ignore or report the problem. If user chooses to report the problem gnome-abrt application opens:

_images/gnome_abrt.png

Report button then starts a reporting wizard guiding user through reporting process.

Testing ABRT functionality

To make sure you won’t miss a crash of your application you should verify that abrt works as expected.

Simplest way to do so is to crash sleep executable available everywhere:

sleep 10m &
kill -SIGSEGV %1

Sleep then produces segmentation fault and should be caught by abrt’s C/C++ hook. If it’s not working correctly consult Debugging ABRT.

will-crash

For testing the functionality of various hooks we’ve created a set of crashing executables called will-crash [1].

First, install the package:

yum install will-crash

Then run one of the crashing executables depending on which hook you would like to test, most commonly C/C++:

will_segfault

This executable segfaults immediately and should be caught by abrt. To get a list of other crashing executables run:

rpm -ql will-crash | grep bin

Footnotes

[1]http://github.com/sorki/will-crash