I used this one weird trick years ago to try to recover a heavily edited but unsaved source file from a frozen text editor (emacs?) on an old SunOS system. I thought I was pretty clever until I realised that the text wasn't stored in a contiguous buffer and I had to spend ages rearranging the out-of-order blocks in the strings output. I suspect now that it might have been quicker to just re-type the original file, but I was stubborn back then.