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]
