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 this uncommon, and the term
`dump' now has a faintly archaic flavor. 2. A backup. This
usage is typical only at large timesharing installations.
