[Techtalk] Rescue data in a hung vi process?

[Amanda Babcock]

I have a hung vi process.  vi was started by mutt, which was running under
screen; screen seems to be fine, so I think it's vi.

I accidentally typed some control character that hung vi.  Unfortunately,
I had not saved my (two hours worth of) changes.  The /tmp file only
contains the message I was replying to.

Here are the statuses of the processes:

seeker 52823  0.0  1.9  8796  504  p1  S+    8:53AM   1:00.42 mutt
seeker 53516  0.0  0.4   628   96  p1  I+    9:50AM   0:00.01 sh -c vi '/tmp/mutt-mercury-52823-23'
seeker 53517  0.0  2.9  1608  780  p1  I+    9:50AM   0:07.77 vi /tmp/mutt-mercury-52823-23

More info, from 'top':

52823 seeker    10   0  8796K   496K wait     1:00  0.00%  0.00% mutt
52821 seeker     2   0  1704K   940K select   0:09  0.00%  0.00% screen
53517 seeker     3   0  1608K   772K ttyin    0:08  0.00%  0.00% vi

Does the 'ttyin' mean anything?

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?

Thanks!
Amanda