A core dump is the printing or the copying to a more permanent medium (such as a hard disk ) the contents of random access memory ( RAM ) at one moment in time. One can think of it as a full-length "snapshot" of RAM. A core dump is taken mainly for the purpose of debugging a program. With the arrival of higher-level languages and interactive debugging, few problems require a core dump these days. It's more likely to be used by specialized programmers who maintain and occasionally have to debug problems in operating system.
