Getting rid of 'There may be a dump' pause

Karl Lehenbauer karl at sugar.hackercorp.com
Wed Jun 13 15:55:44 AEST 1990


I don't know where I got the impression that the maddening and near-
worthless "There may be a system dump memory image in the swap device.
Do you want to save it?" message was part of the kernel or boot
binary -- it isn't.  

(The message is bogus because the whole thing is
bogus -- 99% of the time there is not a dump in the swap space, and
if the routine that did the dump just wrote some kind of header out there,
like "THIS IS A DUMP", and the header wasn't there, the system could
KNOW that there wasn't a dump.)

(It's maddening because your system sits there waiting for you to physically
type into the keyboard to tell it not to dump the nonexistent dump.  Meanwhile
your system does nothing.)

How was that for building tension?  OK, OK, I'll tell.

It's a shell script in /etc called dumpsave.

Just make dumpsave do an 'exit 0' before it asks the question.

I include a context diff below for the terminally lazy.  cd to /etc and
patch away.  Probably a good idea to make a backup copy.

*** odumpsave	Wed Jun 13 00:37:48 1990
--- dumpsave	Wed Jun 13 00:41:56 1990
***************
*** 22,27
  #
  
  echo 'There may be a system dump memory image in the swap device.'
  while :
  do
  	echo 'Do you want to save it? (y/n)> \c'

--- 22,33 -----
  #
  
  echo 'There may be a system dump memory image in the swap device.'
+ 
+ # the following three lines cause the dump to be skipped
+ echo "But there probably isn't."
+ echo "So I'll just blow it off."
+ exit 0
+ 
  while :
  do
  	echo 'Do you want to save it? (y/n)> \c'
-- 
-- uunet!sugar!karl
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