Let’s take a look at the first few fields in a crash report. «Process» in UNIX means a running app. The fields are:

1. Process – the app or process name.
2. Path – where the app binary lives on disk.
3. Identifier – usually the binary or bundle name, but not always.
4. Version – the binary version or ??? if unknown.
5. Code Type – Intel or Apple Silicon. «Universal» if both.
6. Parent Process – the binary or app that launched this process.
7. User ID – the UNIX id or PID of the process – the same process ID as shown in Terminal.

Origin. Understanding Finder crash report alerts in macOS

At the end of each crash report, there’s a «Full Report» section, which is essentially a full raw JSON dump of the entire .ips file in text format. The raw JSON does contain some additional info not shown in the Console window – such as Apple Mac model ID, CPU type, code signing, and other info.

Also be aware that an app may have multiple threads running, so a similar summary like the one above will be listed for each thread. But usually, the crashed thread number is listed at the very top of the report so you know which thread number to look at.

All of this may seem overwhelming to the newcomer, but once you get the hang of reading crash reports, you can usually quickly and easily figure out what happened – and if you can do anything about it. In the above example, since a required library was missing, a simple reinstall of the app using its installer would be in order.