Using the stack dump debugger

The stack dump debugger enables you to perform a post-mortem analysis of a dump of your application's Smalltalk process stack at the point at which it failed. A stack dump contains information about the state of the image at the time of an error for a running Smalltalk program.

On workstations for CICS, a stack dump file is created, using the file name of the image that was running and a file extension of sdf. For all native applications, the file name is aaaaaaxx.sdf, where aaaaaa is the first six characters of the image name and xx is an assigned number

Stack dump files are created in the current directory of the running application. For CICS 3.1 the current directory is the runtime directory; for CICS Server for UNIX, Solaris, or NT, the current directory is the dump directory.

You can use the stack dump facility to view summary information for each stack dump.

This section covers the following major topics:

•	Viewing a stack dump in Smalltalk

•	Writing a stack dump exception routine

The setup for the stack dump debugger should be done at installation time by a system administrator.