Gfilui

I've been getting alot of segv crashes in gnome-shell and although the apport window has alot of info, it's not very user friendly (window is really small, no way of searching, no way of saving a copy to text file etc).

Is there a way I can access the information available to apport directly from the terminal? Does gnome-shell save traceback logs somewhere?

I know there's a logfile for apport in /var/log but that log file doesn't offer nearly the same level of detail.

You can find the files in /var/crash. That's pretty much the whole answer to your question, so to make my answer more interesting I'll show you how I know this, which might interest others who want to test crashing behaviour.

$ cat ~/playground/crash.c
/* crash.c - simple program that crashes by raising a segmentation fault */

#include <signal.h>

int main(void)

 raise(SIGSEGV);

The above program was written by Eliah Kagan. I have compiled it into an executable binary file called crash in the same directory (using the command gcc -ansi -pedantic -Wall -Wextra -o crash crash.c). This program reliably segfaults :)

Bash won't itself crash when I run this program, so Apport won't complain, but for interesting reasons discussed at great length in this chat, ksh will itself crash when I use it to call a program that crashes, and Apport will create a report for it. Let's try it!

zanna@toaster:/var/crash$ ksh93
$ /home/zanna/playground/crash
Memory fault(coredump)
$ exit
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
zanna@toaster:/var/crash$ ls
_bin_ksh93.1000.crash
zanna@toaster:/var/crash$ file _bin_ksh93.1000.crash 
_bin_ksh93.1000.crash: ASCII text, with very long lines

There you go.

After you make the report, you will get 2 more files here, one ending in .upload and one ending in .uploaded, which may or may not be more readable, but in any case, contain the information sent by Apport.