[Techtalk] Rescue data in a hung vi process?

[Laurel Fan]

On Wed, May 08, 2002 at 12:34:49PM -0400, Amanda Babcock wrote:
> Anyway, I thought maybe I could send it a signal of some kind (I already 
> tried the obvious things like typing ^Q in case I'd typed a ^S).  I would 
> want to signal it either to make it dump core or start responding to input - 
> dumping core is fine if I'd be able to recover my message from the core
> dump.  But I'm not sure what signals I should send.  TRAP?  CONT?

SEGV usually works to make things dump core.  Make sure you don't have
a limit on your coredumpsize (do you know how to do that? if not,
which shell?).  Then you can try using strings and grep to recover
your file from the core dump.

/dev/mem is the memory device for the entire machine (so you need root
to access it).  strings and grepping that could possibly help...

-- 
laurel at sdf.lonestar.org
http://dreadnought.gorgorg.org