JargonFile/entries/dump.txt

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2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
dump
n. 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 hex 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 flavor. 2. A backup. This usage is typical only at large timesharing installations.