2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
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flush
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2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
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v. 1. [common] To delete something, usually superfluous, or to abort an
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operation. All that nonsense has been flushed. 2. [Unix/C] To force buffered
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I/O to disk, as with an fflush (3) call. This is not an abort or deletion as
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in sense 1, but a demand for early completion! 3. To leave at the end of a
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day's work (as opposed to leaving for a meal). I'm going to flush now. Time
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to flush. 4. To exclude someone from an activity, or to ignore a person.
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Flush was standard ITS terminology for aborting an output operation; one
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spoke of the text that would have been printed, but was not, as having been
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flushed. It is speculated that this term arose from a vivid image of
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flushing unwanted characters by hosing down the internal output buffer,
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washing the characters away before they could be printed. The Unix/C usage,
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on the other hand, was propagated by the fflush (3) call in C's standard I/O
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library (though it is reported to have been in use among BLISS programmers
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at DEC and on Honeywell and IBM machines as far back as 1965). Unix/C
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hackers found the ITS usage confusing, and vice versa. Crunchly gets flush
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ed. (The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 76-05-01. The previous cartoon
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was 76-02-20:2.
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