recover lost text by coredumping firefox 2023-10-20 sometimes websites fuck up and erase your text. websites either glitch, crash, freeze, or are just designed extremely poorly, and your 5+ minutes of writing effort have disappeared into the æthernet. the usual ctrl+z doesn't work - either does the back button. your text is gone. it often feels like you might never be capable of recapturing that writing, even if you try to re-think and re-write it. a tangible loss - some magic that's gone forever. or sometimes it's just a really fucking annoying survey question that you answered, but you didn't even really want to do the survey, but you had already started so you're not backing out now, and also you just HAD to know which hogwarts familiar you were, even though everyone knows you're going to be that fucking frog that neville owns, but now the fucking browser fucked up, or maybe it was the website, i don't know, but my text is god damned gone forever, and i hate this earth, and now i shall throw my keyboard out the nearest window. this type of data loss happens to me far too often, and when it does, my internal reality turns into a hellscape. this also happens to yngmar[0], and he reacts appropriately: - Yell "Fuck you and your piece of shit website". - Close tab - Do some woodworking, sew clothes, plant trees, grow crops, help refugees, etc. i recently discovered this little trick to rescue any text that was recently typed into firefox. coredumping might seem unreliable, but it has never failed me before. 1. find the firefox pid pgrep -l firefox 2. attach gdb to firefox and dump its core sudo gdb -p <pid> gcore firefox.dump <this takes awhile> exit 3. find your lost text in the coredump strings firefox.dump | grep 'phrase-from-your-text' 4. remove coredump rm firefox.dump that's it! text recovered. 😎 shoutout to klardotsh[1] for inspiring me to post this. love, j3s [0]: https://social.tchncs.de/@yngmar/111269159153831442 [1]: https://merveilles.town/@klardotsh

follow me on mastodon or bluesky!

last updated 2023-10-20T00:00:00.000Z