How to symbolicate Mac OSX crash reports issued by Apple?

Question

For iOS crash reports, it is sufficient to drag and drop the crash report to the Organizer.

Symbolicating iPhone App Crash Reports

But this method doesn't work for Mac OSX crash reports.

How can I symbolicate my Mac OSX crash report ?

Thanks !!

Answer 1

You can use the atos command to get the line number where the app crashed.

Heres a quick guide:

1. Create a directory for your working files
2. Open Xcode, select Window->Organizer, goto the Archive tab and find the version of your app that experienced the crash.
3. Right click on the app archive and select "Show in Finder"
4. Right click on the .xarchive, select "Show Contents" and find the AppName.dSYM directory and the app and copy them to your working folder
5. Copy the stack trace to your working folder
6. Open terminal and change to your working folder. An ls should show YourApp.app YourApp.app.dSYM stacktrace.txt
7. Open your stack trace in TextEdit. Your going to need to find the Code Type from the header (system architecture - eg. X86-64) and the addresses of the crash. Search through the threads to find the one that crashed (it will say something like "Thread 2 Crashed") then find your objects. You need the two addresses (hex numbers) from that line to get the code line.

8. Once you've got all the information you need to run the following in the terminal:

   atos -o YourApp.app/Contents/MacOS/YourApp -arch x86_64 -l [load-address] [address]

For example, heres an extract from a stacktrace:

Process:         MyApp [228]
Path:            /Applications/MyApp.app/Contents/MacOS/MyApp
Identifier:      uk.co.company.app
Version:         1.0 (1)
App Item ID:     774943227
App External ID: 218062633
Code Type:       X86-64 (Native)
Parent Process:  launchd [154]
Responsible:     MyApp [228]
User ID:         501

Date/Time:       2013-12-17 10:20:45.816 +0100
OS Version:      Mac OS X 10.9 (13A603)
Report Version:  11
Anonymous UUID:  7AA662B1-7696-A2C5-AF56-9D4BA2CE9515


Crashed Thread:  2

Exception Type:  EXC_CRASH (SIGABRT)
Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000000, 0x0000000000000000

<snip>

Thread 2 Crashed:
0   libsystem_kernel.dylib          0x00007fff8b95a866 __pthread_kill + 10
1   libsystem_pthread.dylib         0x00007fff8bf4f35c pthread_kill + 92
2   libsystem_c.dylib               0x00007fff87571bba abort + 125
3   libsystem_malloc.dylib          0x00007fff897ae093 free + 411
4   uk.co.company.app           0x0000000103580606 0x10356e000 + 75270
5   uk.co.company.app               0x00000001035803da 0x10356e000 + 74714
6   com.apple.Foundation            0x00007fff8d00970b __NSThread__main__ + 1318
7   libsystem_pthread.dylib         0x00007fff8bf4e899 _pthread_body + 138
8   libsystem_pthread.dylib         0x00007fff8bf4e72a _pthread_start + 137
9   libsystem_pthread.dylib         0x00007fff8bf52fc9 thread_start + 13

I can see that the "Code Type" is x86_64, that Thread 2 crashed, and that on line 4 my code was running so we have the addresses we need. Using this information I run the following:

$ atos -o MyApp.app/Contents/MacOS/MyApp -arch x86_64 -l 0x10356e000 0x0000000103580606

This returns:

got symbolicator for MyApp.app/Contents/MacOS/MyApp, base address 100000000
obj_free (in MyApp) (somefile.c:135)

Telling me my app crashed at line 135 of somefile.c