Is it safe to delete "core" files?

I have a bunch of these on my server, I understand it was generated from some error on my site before, & each of these "core" files are 30mb+ in size which is huge altogether..

They are named like this: core.28761 with random numbers at the end..

I have been scared to touch these because my site might go bonkers or something, I dunno, but now they're starting to annoy me.. So would it be ok to delete them? Is there a possibility that my site might be affected even just by a little bit if I removed these files?

 

yes, you can remove them without problem

when a program or process crashes the memory contents are dumped in a core file, which can be analyzed by experts to see what went wrong
deleting them won't effect your sites at all

 

Thanks so much, that's all I needed to hear.

 

Before you delete them, you may want to check when they were dated, and do this command in SSH:

$ file core.*

 

What does that do? & I saw when they were dated but I've already deleted them.

 

For debugging purposes. Looking at the dates let you know when your application or daemon crashed.

 

Yep, I figured that out when I saw them & did check the dates, but what exactly does $ file core.* do?

 

If you run that against a debugger, you can basically see what went wrong when the application crashed.

If you're not a developer, they are useless.

 

It just outputs what is contained in the file for the most part, as an example:

root@atlantis [/home/mddhost]# file .ftpquota
.ftpquota: ASCII text

Code (markup):

I would personally use "ls -lh | grep file" for something similar to this:

root@atlantis [/home/mddhost]# ls -lh | grep .ftpquota
-rw-------   1 mddhost mddhost   11 Sep 27 00:33 .ftpquota

Code (markup):