Copying data from a running ruby script

Question

Hi,

I have a long running ruby script, in Linux, which has some interesting data stored in a hash table. The program does not have any persistence mechanism and I am interested in copying the data from it's hash table. Is there any way to copy data from the memory of a running ruby script?

raj

Answer 1

It's not for the faint of heart, but there's a tool called Hijack that can give you a live irb prompt to a running ruby process. RubyInside has a very brief rundown and example of how to use it.

Answer 2

It would be very easy to add a signal handler that responds by dumping a serialized version of your hashtable.

See Signal.trap.