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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
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
(1994-12-01)