For my own future reference …
Today I encountered an interesting little issue where I could not send an ABORT signal to a running process to kill it with a core dump because the process had a limit of 0 for the core dump size. Try as I might, I could not find a way to change that process’s core dump limit.
Turns out there is another way of tackling the problem, which is to use gdb to generate a core image :-
gdb >attach PID >gcore /var/tmp/core.PID
There is of course the gcore shell script wrapper for this, but that may not work if the working directory of the process no longer exists.