< 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)