Flush

From JargonWiki

The Jargon File Parts of this article are based on the Jargon File, v. 4.4.7, a public domain document of hacker jargon.

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 flushed.

(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 76-05-01. The previous cartoon was 76-02-20:2.)

Sources

Public Domain This article is in the public domain and is not subject to copyright, trademark, or any other legal protection of intellectual property. Any and all user contributions to this page are also immediately dedicated to the public domain. Editors of this page must accede to these terms as special conditions of the standard editing privileges.