Mac OS X debug FAQ: Help, I'm having a problem with [fill in the blank] on my Mac OS X system, how do I troubleshoot it? I just ran into a problem when trying to create a Safari web clip dashboard widget, where the web clip isn't properly updating itself, and I stopped for a moment to think.
To find the crash files, you can run Console app which will display all the system messages. If any specific application crashed, look in User Reports. If it's system crash, check in System Reports. Once you have found the crash file, you can Reveal in Finder (usually located in /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports). If the crash resulted in reboot, in All Messages look line stating its Shutdown Cause and check the following for further information.
Alternatively you can also check the log files in /var/log (such as system.log), or in real-time by log stream. You can also check where dumps are generated by monitoring system.log file, e.g. Tail -f /var/log/system.log grep crash # Hit Control-C to stop. To scan for the previous crash files, run: grep crash /var/log/system.log To generate the actual core dump files (in /cores), see: To make sure your macOS is healthy, perform the following tests:.
Use app to check your current battery health. If your system reboots often, you can also try to:. Make sure you didn't modify your boot-args (check by nvram boot-args).