[Techtalk] Rescue data in a hung vi process?

[Laurel Fan]

On Wed, May 08, 2002 at 03:11:46PM -0400, Amanda Babcock wrote:
> I see the original, pre-editing text.  I see some lines that are obviously
> changes I was making.  But some strings that I *know* were in the final
> product are just not in there, not even as fragments.  Where was vi keeping 
> the work-in-progress, if not in memory?
> 
> Do coredumps only dump *part* of the memory?

Coredumps should dump all of the memory.  Not knowing anything about
what data structures vi uses, it is possible that the fragments are
just too small for you to notice.  Are you using the strings command?
By default it only shows strings that contain at least 4 printable
characters (I don't think it considers newlines and tabs to be
printable... if you have a lot of small lines you might want to try
giving strings a smaller minimum size).

On the other hand, if vi crashed, it may well have done so because of
a memory bug that also caused it to lose some of your data.

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