Crash Reporter

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Crash Reporter
Apple Crash Reporter from Mac OS X v10.4.

Developer: Apple Computer
Latest release: 2.1 /
OS: Mac OS X
Use: crash reporter
Website: http://www.apple.com/

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 Computer 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).
Developer mode crash report
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Developer mode crash report

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 writer for them to use.

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