What does this mean?

I've got four directories with files in CHMODDED to 777.
My perl script creates, deletes and appends files as required, but the server keeps generating a 381k file called 'core', CHMODDED to 600.
This file being there messes up my program, and every time I delete it, it generates another one.

Does anyone know what is is and what I can do to stop it?
Cheers
Flink

Howdy fellow Manchester person,

What OS are you running? A core file is an indication that either your perl script or another program has a bit of a problem.

Dumping core means that a fatal exception has occured (memory violation, something like that) and an image of the program as it crashed is dumped to disk by the OS.

You need to find out which task is crashing and why. You will probably need to be root and run the command:

file /path/core

where /path/ is the path to your core file. this will tell you which task crashed. from there you will have to start digging around to based on the task itself.

Hope this helps.