11.8.5 Reporting crashes

Very occasionally, there are circumstances where it is not possible to generate a bug report form from the running Lisp which has the bug. For example, a delivered image may lack the debugger, or the bug may cause lisp to crash completely. In such circumstances:

1. It is still useful for us to see a bug report form from your lisp image so that we can see your system details. Generate the form before your code is loaded or a broken call is made, and attach it to your report.
2. Create a file init.lisp which loads your code that leads to the crash.
3. Run LispWorks with init.lisp as the initialization file and with output redirected to a file. For example, on Mac OS X:
% "/Applications/LispWorks 5.1/LispWorks.app/Contents/MacOS/lispworks-5-1-0-macos-universal" -init init.lisp > lw.out

where % denotes a Unix shell prompt.

On Windows:

C:\> "Program Files\LispWorks\lispworks-5-1-0-x86-win32.exe" -init init.lisp > lw.out

where C:\> denotes the prompt in a MS-DOS command window.

On Linux:

% /usr/bin/lispworks-5-1-0-x86-linux -init init.lisp > lw.out

where % denotes a Unix shell prompt.

On UNIX (SPARC in this example):

% /usr/lib/lispworks/lib/5-1-0-0/config/lispworks- 5-1-0 -sparc-solaris -init init.lisp > lw.out
4. Attach the lw.out file to your report. In general it is not useful to edit the output of your Lisp image, so please send it as-is. Where output files are very large (> 2MB) and repetitive, the first and last 200 lines might be adequate.