Dump N. 1. An Undigested And Voluminous Mass Of Information About A Problem Or The State Of A System

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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.

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