Where To See Crash Reports For App On Mac OS X

The advent of the CrashReporter in Mac OS X was a boon for developers -- suddenly, a capsule of what caused the problem with a given application could be instantly captured by the end user and sent back to the developer for examination.

Unfortunately, deciphering the logs generated by CrashReporter (stored in LibraryLogsCrashReporter) can be a daunting task, making them less than explanatory for a user attempting to diagnose problems on their own systems.

The following is a quick introduction to pulling salient information from crash reports and using them in potential troubleshooting routines.

DateTime: 2006-03-09 01:15:10.431 -0500 OS Version: 10.4.5 (Build 8H14) Report Version: 4.

Since you should already be aware of your current Mac OS X version and the date, this section is not of much concern to the end user, and is more useful for developers looking for patterns implicating a specific iteration of Mac OS X.

Command: iMovie HD Path: ApplicationsiMovie HD.appContentsMacOSiMovie HD Parent: WindowServer 63 Version: 6.0.1 (6.0.1) Build Version: 2 Project Name: iMovieApp Source Version: 2550000.

This section will tell you the name of the process that crashed.

Looking at this section is particularly useful if youre not sure which application caused a crash.

It is also worth looking at if you think you know which application crashed, but arent sure.

Many applications make use of Apple-spawned processes or other components of which the user may not be aware.

Exception: EXCBADACCESS (0x0001) Codes: KERNINVALIDADDRESS (0x0001) at 0x1718b000.

According to Apple, there are four common types of exception.

It may be triggered by either a data access or an instruction fetch.

Where To See Crash Reports For App On Series Of Events

This section shows, in reverse chronological order, the series of events that happened right before the crash in each thread.

The first column indicates order (again, reverse chronological).

However, you might also see something like com.apple.iMovie here -- which would point to the application iMovie itself.

The third column is the counter program address (e.g.

DoFastCopyMapFPUclPUcl4Rect) that is taking place.

Now we know that the process main is responsible for the exception (crash).

Thankfully, the developer of the aforementioned plug-in ( CFX ) was nice enough to include procedure labels that indicate each task.

Most applications (including most of Apples), however, do not do this, and you will instead see a numerical representation of a task.

With this information, you should be able to tell what application (or plug-in) caused the system crash, and what series of events triggered the crash.

You can then take appropriate action -- attempting to revert to an earlier version of said application, avoiding use of a plug-in (or deleting it), or running general maintenance procedures and checking for persistence of the issue.

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Where To See Crash Reports For App On Mac Os