dump

operating system 1. An undigested and voluminous mass of

information about a problem or the state of a system,

especially one routed to the slowest available output device

(compare core dump), and most especially one consisting of

hexadecimal or octal runes describing the byte-by-byte

state of memory, mass storage, or some file. In elder days,

debugging was generally done by "groveling over" a dump (see

grovel); increasing use of high-level languages and

interactive debuggers has made such tedium uncommon, and the

term "dump" now has a faintly archaic flavour.

2. A backup. This usage is typical only at large

time-sharing installations.

Unix manual page: dump(1).

[Jargon File]

(1994-12-01)