Hi, My tests show that the db_dump binaries produced by building libdb 6.1.26 and 6.2.23 correctly detect the loop when trying to salvage the DB provided by Stephan Sürken in the first post and exit cleanly with exit code 1, instead of consuming unbounded CPU time. However, Berkeley DB 6.x versions are not packaged by Debian.
Regards, Lionel Debroux.