ips2crash is a macOS command line too to convert a .ips file to a legacy .crash log file.

zouyiqi@ZviciiMBP ~ % ips2crash -o /Users/zouyiqi/Downloads /Users/zouyiqi/Downloads/cross-platform-tester-2022-07-04-095409.ips
An error occurred when reading the file '/Users/zouyiqi/Downloads/cross-platform-tester-2022-07-04-095409.ips'.

if i dont use the -o option, it works fine, I can copy what I need from the terminal. But if I add -o option, it reports error.

Thanks for the great tool! But, the app MacSymbolicator (https://github.com/inket/MacSymbolicator) won't symbolicate reports generated with ips2crash because the phrase "Binary Images" should have a colon after it. (Real .crash reports have the colon.)

The fix is simple. Change

[tMutableString appendString:@"Binary Images\n"];

to

[tMutableString appendString:@"Binary Images:\n"];

and MacSymbolicator works properly.

Thank you for this great tool !

Would you please consider this trivial pull request, in order to get thread names in resulting .crash files as in the good old days...

When available, it just extracts thread name from .ips file and add it to the thread ID line in the .crash file.

Definitely helpful in multi threaded debugging scenarios.

Many of the crash reports I have include an image object from source "A":

  "usedImages" : [
  {
    "source" : "P",
    "arch" : "x86_64",
    "base" : 140703613407232,
    "size" : 225280,
    "uuid" : "12bd6f13-c452-35ee-9069-51befef29f1a",
    "path" : "\/usr\/lib\/system\/libsystem_kernel.dylib",
    "name" : "libsystem_kernel.dylib"
  },
  ...
  {
    "source" : "P",
    "arch" : "x86_64",
    "base" : 140703613632512,
    "size" : 49152,
    "uuid" : "29a2750e-f31b-3630-8761-242a6bc3e99e",
    "path" : "\/usr\/lib\/system\/libsystem_pthread.dylib",
    "name" : "libsystem_pthread.dylib"
  },
  {
    "size" : 0,
    "source" : "A",
    "base" : 0,
    "uuid" : "00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000"
  }
],

These image records have no name, arch, or path properties and are typically zero sized.

The problem is, the code that builds the array of images objects will fail if any image object can't be parsed, leaving a nil array of images. The result is that none of the stack frame symbols get translated properly.

My solution was to simply allow for this kind of image.

While I was in there, I also added a source property and implemented the code to parse the architecture property (which was defined, but wasn't being read).

I tried this tool with an IPS file produced by Adobe Acrobat, and I am very confused by the result. Originally I got the "Unable to read file" error, and applied this working patch to get a little better error handling:

--- a/tool_ips2crash/ips2crash/main.m
+++ b/tool_ips2crash/ips2crash/main.m
@@ -19,6 +19,8 @@
 
 #include <sys/types.h>
 #include <unistd.h>
+
+#include <err.h>
 #include <getopt.h>
 
 void usage(void);
@@ -125,20 +127,19 @@ int main(int argc, const char * argv[])
                 switch(tError.code)
                 {
                     case NSFileReadNoSuchFileError:
-                        
+                        perror("huh?");
                         (void)fprintf(stderr, "'%s': No such file.\n",tIPSFile.fileSystemRepresentation);
                         
                         break;
                     
                     case NSFileReadNoPermissionError:
-                        
+                        perror("huh?");
                         (void)fprintf(stderr, "'%s': Permission denied.\n",tIPSFile.fileSystemRepresentation);
                         
                         break;
                         
                     default:
-                        
-                        (void)fprintf(stderr, "'%s': Unable to read file.\n",tIPSFile.fileSystemRepresentation);
+                        warn("'%s': Unable to read file (%ld)", tIPSFile.fileSystemRepresentation, tError.code);
                         
                         break;
                 }

And I get this behavior:

jhawk@lrr Debug % ls -ld b.ips
-rw-r--r--  1 jhawk  staff  48289 May 27 13:26 b.ips
jhawk@lrr Debug % ./ips2crash test-no-file
huh?: No such file or directory
'test-no-file': No such file.
jhawk@lrr Debug % ./ips2crash b.ips       
ips2crash: 'b.ips': Unable to read file (3840): No such file or directory
jhawk@lrr Debug % 

Which I don't understand. Obviously NSFileReadNoSuchFileError isn't being returned, and the file is present, but there is still a similar error.

This seems to have something to do with the file format, since

jhawk@lrr Debug % cp b.ips b.json
jhawk@lrr Debug % ./ips2crash b.json
ips2crash: 'b.json': Unable to read file (3840): No such file or directory
jhawk@lrr Debug % jq < b.ips > b.json
parse error: Invalid numeric literal at line 305, column 4
jhawk@lrr Debug % ./ips2crash b.json 
'b.json': An error occurred when reading the .ips file.
Invalid type of value for key: (null).
jhawk@lrr Debug % 

That is, first I copy the file to demonstate that the file extension is unrelated. Then I use jq to parse the JSON file, which does report that the JSON is malformed in some way. But the re-parsed JSON doesn't work either (although the error makes a little more sense, but not really).

Inspecting the file, the jq JSON error ("Invalid numeric literal at line 305, column 4") is because the file ends like this:

   299	  "experiments" : [
   300	
   301	  ]
   302	}
   303	}
   304	
   305	RAM: 65536MB
   306	Machine: arm64
   307	Model: MacBookPro18,4
   308	CPU * Core count: 10
   309	CPU Frequency: 0MHz
   310	Bus Frequency: 0MHz
   311	Open GL Renderer: Apple M1 Max
   312	Open GL Version: 2.1 Metal - 76.3
   313	Open GL Vendor: Apple
...

so there's some plain text information appended to this file. But jq ends up stripping that out, leaving what seems like a valid IPS JSON file, and yet it still doesn't work for ips2crash.

Curiously, if I strip out the out the non-JSON text at the end:

jhawk@lrr Debug % head -304 b.ips > b304.ips
jhawk@lrr Debug % ./ips2crash b304.ips|head
Process:               AdobeAcrobat [7389]
Path:                  /Applications/Adobe Acrobat Beta/Adobe Acrobat.app/Contents/MacOS/AdobeAcrobat
Identifier:            com.adobe.Acrobat.Pro
Version:               22.001.10171 (22.001.10171)
Code Type:             ARM-64 (Native)
Parent Process:        launchd [1]
User ID:               501

Date/Time:             2022-05-26 07:25:27.532 -04:00
OS Version:            macOS 12.3.1 (21E258)
jhawk@lrr Debug % 

it seems to work fine [Yay!]. Yet this should be functionally equivalent to what jq does. Indeed:

jhawk@lrr Debug % jq < b304.ips > b304.json
jhawk@lrr Debug % ls -l b.json b304.json
-rw-r--r--  1 jhawk  staff  68796 May 27 14:37 b.json
-rw-r--r--  1 jhawk  staff  68796 May 27 14:43 b304.json
jhawk@lrr Debug % diff b.json b304.json
jhawk@lrr Debug % ./ips2crash b304.json
'b304.json': An error occurred when reading the .ips file.
Invalid type of value for key: (null).
jhawk@lrr Debug % 

I think I'm not at liberty to share the Acrobat crash report here, but it looks like this problem happens anytime an IPS file is reformatted via jq. Here's a crash from Preview.app that I have attached:

jhawk@lrr Debug % jq < Preview-2022-05-24-100028.ips > Preview-2022-05-24-100028.json
jhawk@lrr Debug % ls -l Preview-2022-05-24-100028.*
-rw-------@ 1 jhawk  staff  21400 May 27 14:31 Preview-2022-05-24-100028.ips
-rw-r--r--  1 jhawk  staff  27616 May 27 14:44 Preview-2022-05-24-100028.json
jhawk@lrr Debug % ./ips2crash Preview-2022-05-24-100028.json 
'Preview-2022-05-24-100028.json': An error occurred when reading the .ips file.
Invalid type of value for key: (null).
jhawk@lrr Debug % ./ips2crash Preview-2022-05-24-100028.ips| head
Process:               Preview [94083]
Path:                  /System/Applications/Preview.app/Contents/MacOS/Preview
Identifier:            com.apple.Preview
Version:               11.0 (1033.3)
Code Type:             ARM-64 (Native)
Parent Process:        launchd [1]
User ID:               501

Date/Time:             2022-05-24 10:00:25.573 -04:00
OS Version:            macOS 12.3.1 (21E258)

jhawk@lrr Debug % 

Workaround

Oh hey, it turns out jq has a "compact" option (-c) which appears to produce output that works fine with ips2crash. So, e.g.:

jhawk@lrr Debug % jq -c < b.ips > b.cjson
jhawk@lrr Debug % ./ips2crash b.cjson| sed -ne 2d -e 4d -e 1,10p
Process:               AdobeAcrobat [7389]
Identifier:            com.adobe.Acrobat.Pro
Code Type:             ARM-64 (Native)
Parent Process:        launchd [1]
User ID:               501

Date/Time:             2022-05-26 07:25:27.532 -04:00
OS Version:            macOS 12.3.1 (21E258)
jhawk@lrr Debug %