RHEL 8 how to leave core files in working directory

Question

I have a product with many executables, and in its older versions (RHEL 5 and previous) the default behavior when a crash occurred was to deposit the core file in the executable's current working directory, with the name core.pid. In RHEL 7 and 8, the new behavior is that all core files go to /var/lib/systemd/coredump/. In order to avoid modifying about a dozen watchdog programs that expect the old behavior, I'd prefer to just revert to the old core locations (in process's cwd). How do I change that behavior?

Answer 1

Looks like I found my own answer. I added this line to /etc/sysctl.d/99-sysctl.conf:

kernel.core_pattern = core.%p

and that's all that was necessary. This takes effect after reboot, but you can also make it immediate by running

echo "core.%p" > /proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern

Note that my servers are NOT running abrtd, and this likely has an effect on whether this solution works.