CentOS: When I SSH, core.* files are created

I have the same problem on a CPanel setup. In my case, running

strings core.nnnn | less

shows that the problem can be traced to an errant Perl command. This is the offending section of /etc/bashrc (found by grep'ing for perl in startup scripts):

if [ "$LOCALLIBUSER" != "root" ]; then
    eval $(perl -Mlocal::lib)
fi

If I try running eval $(perl -Mlocal::lib) at the console, it dumps core, so this is definitely the problem.

This is common enough that a quick google search turned up this thread, which doesn't offer much advice other than checking the perl modules.

Core files are signs of a core dump. It means the program has crashed and you have this core dump of the programs' memory at the time of dump.

You can prevent it if you put 'ulimit -c 0' into sysconfig - you won't get core files. But you should also first check out what is crashing and why - you may have a serious problem there.

Read more at http://aplawrence.com/Linux/limit_core_files.html

Command:

gdb -c core.1084 

will explain which process has crashed and why.

Perhaps there's some GUI program that is set up to run automatically in your .bashrc, which crashes when it has no access to running X server.