flush

v. 1. [common] To delete something, usually superfluous, or to abort an
operation. All that nonsense has been flushed. 2. [Unix/C] To force buffered
I/O to disk, as with an fflush (3) call. This is not an abort or deletion as
in sense 1, but a demand for early completion! 3. To leave at the end of a
day's work (as opposed to leaving for a meal). I'm going to flush now. Time
to flush. 4. To exclude someone from an activity, or to ignore a person.
Flush was standard ITS terminology for aborting an output operation; one
spoke of the text that would have been printed, but was not, as having been
flushed. It is speculated that this term arose from a vivid image of
flushing unwanted characters by hosing down the internal output buffer,
washing the characters away before they could be printed. The Unix/C usage,
on the other hand, was propagated by the fflush (3) call in C's standard I/O
library (though it is reported to have been in use among BLISS programmers
at DEC and on Honeywell and IBM machines as far back as 1965). Unix/C
hackers found the ITS usage confusing, and vice versa. Crunchly gets flush
ed. (The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 76-05-01. The previous cartoon
was 76-02-20:2.

