Crash Reporter (Mac OS X)

Crash Reporter is the standard crash reporter in Mac OS X, found at /System/Library/CoreServices/Crash Reporter.app. Crash Reporter can send the Unix crash logs to Apple Inc. for their engineers to look at.

Crash Reporter has three modes of operations:

• Basic — The default mode. Only application crashes are reported, and the dialog doesn’t contain any debugging information.
• Developer — In addition to application crashes, crashes are also displayed for background and system processes.
• Server — The default for OS X Server systems. No crash reports are shown to the user (though they are still logged).
• None — Disables the dialog prompt. Crash reports are neither displayed nor logged.

The developer tool CrashReporterPrefs can be used to change modes, as can using the terminal command defaults write com.apple.CrashReporter DialogType [basic|developer|server].

In basic mode, if Crash Reporter notices an application has crashed twice in succession, it will offer to rename the application’s preference file and try again (corrupted preference files being a common cause of crashes).

When reporting a crash, the top text field of the window has the crash log, while the bottom field is for user comments. Users may also copy and paste the log into their e-mail client to send to a third-party application developer for the developer to use.

[edit] Alternatives

Since Apple's Crash Reporter only submits crash reports to Apple, there are some third party alternatives which allow users to also submit crash reports to the developers of the crashing software.

• Unsanity developed an Input Manager called Smart Crash Reports, that patches Apple software to include a "submit to developer" button within Crash Reporter. ^[1]
• Zonic has also created a crash reporter, which is an alternative to the Apple crash reporter. It can optionally include additional information such as log files and profile reports.^[2]

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Technical Note TN2123: CrashReporter