Comment 6 for bug 1080978

Same surprise here, after adding a custom '/etc/sysctl.d/60-core_pattern.conf' to set it to my desired value, I could not understand why it seemed not applied after a reboot. Finally discovered the echoing inside '/etc/init/apport.conf' and died a little internally.

The proper course of action for apport would probably be to create its own '/etc/sysctl.d/30-core_pattern.conf' ("30" being documented as to be used by packages), instead of hijacking '/proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern' ...