Specifying `--enable-auto-core' to configure tells TeX,
Metafont, and MetaPost to suicide with a SIGQUIT on an input
filename of `HackyInputFileNameForCoreDump.tex' (all three programs
use the `.tex' suffix). This produces a memory dump of the running
executable in a file `core'. (This is unrelated to the standard
memory dump feature in these programs; see section Memory dumps).
You don't actually need to do this to produce a core dump. Just typing
your quit character (usually CTRL-\) when the program is waiting
for input (at `**') will have the same result. But a few sites
want to reliably generate a core dump without human intervention; that's
what --enable-auto-core is for.
With the program undump, you can use `core' to reconstitute
a preloaded executable, which does not need to read a `.fmt'
file to get started. Although preloaded executables save startup time,
they have a big disadvantage: neither the disk space to store them nor
their code segments (at runtime) can be shared. Therefore, if both
tex and latex are running, twice as much memory will be
consumed, to the general detriment of performance.
The undump program is not part of the Web2c distribution, but you
can get it from the CTAN archives as `CTAN:/support/undump',
and it is included in several TeX distributions
(see section `unixtex.ftp' in Kpathsea).
Go to the first, previous, next, last section, table of contents.