21 lines
1.2 KiB
Plaintext
21 lines
1.2 KiB
Plaintext
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.
|
|
|