Dumping the contents of memory to a file

[qznc via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 19 August 2015 at 19:05:09 UTC, Lewis wrote:
> I was wondering if there was a way to dump the contents of the 
> heap to a file.
>
> If the heap is guaranteed to be in one contiguous chunk, then 
> all I would need is:
>
> - The start address of the heap
> - The current size of the heap
>
> If it is not in one contiguous chunk, then it might be a little 
> more complicated.
>
> I'm okay with writing out way more data than needed, I don't 
> need to compress anything or remove unused but allocated space. 
> This is for a debugging tool, and so can be a little hacky.
>
> Is this feasible? Does the request make sense?

You could enable core dumping (ulimit -c unlimited), crash the 
program, and let Linux do it for you.

If you want to program continue to run, then it becomes 
interesting. Are there more threads? You probably want to stop 
them, so nobody modifies the heap while you dump it. Apart from 
that, just look at how to do it in C.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3565232/how-to-programmatically-get-the-address-of-the-heap-on-linux