TIL: How to disable core dumps on AWS Linux

I ran across a situation where a previous sysadmin had enabled core dumps on a server that were filling up the root volume. The dumps weren’t needed, so I decided to disable them, problem is, I’ve never really dealt with core dumps because I’ve never had to, so I had to do some Googling.

Here’s the result:

disableCoreDumps.sh

#!/bin/bash
# Only tested with AWS Linux but should work on RHEL, CentOS, Fedora, etc.

echo '*     hard    core    0' &gt;&gt; /etc/security/limits.conf
echo 'fs.suid_dumpable = 0' &gt;&gt; /etc/sysctl.conf
sysctl -p

Line 4 disables core dump creation for users. Line 5 disables setuid itself from generating core files, and Line 6 applies the changes to the running kernel.