WhatIs

/shəb in-tər-net/

[MUD: from H. P. Lovecraft's evil fictional deity 'Shub-Niggurath', the Black Goat with a Thousand Young]

n. The harsh personification of the Internet, Beast of a Thousand Processes, Eater of Characters, Avatar of Line Noise, and Imp of Call Waiting; the hideous multi-tendriled entity formed of all the manifold connections of the net. A sect of MUDders worships Shub-Internet, sacrificing objects and praying for good connections. To no avail -- its purpose is malign and evil, and is the cause of all network slowdown. Often heard as in

/shrēk/

n. See excl. Occasional CMU usage, also in common use among APL fans and mathematicians, especially category theorists.

/shō-stä-pər/

n. A hardware or (especially) software bug that makes an implementation effectively unusable; one that absolutely has to be fixed before development can go on.

Opposite in connotation from its original theatrical use, which refers to something stunningly *good*.

/shät-gən dē-bəgiŋ/

n. The software equivalent of Easter egging; the making of relatively undirected changes to software in the hope that a bug will be perturbed out of existence. This almost never works, and usually introduces more bugs.

/shȯrt kärd/

/shit-ə-gram/

n. A *really* nasty piece of email.

Compare nastygram, flame.

/shift left (ȯr rīt) lä-ji-k(ə-)lē/

[from any of various machines' instruction sets]

1. vi. To move oneself to the left (right). To move out of the way.

2. imper. "Get out of that (my) seat! You can shift to that empty one to the left (right)." Often used without the 'logical', or as 'left shift' instead of 'shift left'. Sometimes heard as LSH /lish/, from the PDP-10 instruction set.

See Programmer's Cheer.

/shel au̇t/

[UNIX]

n. To spawn an interactive subshell from within a program (e.g., a mailer or editor).

"Bang foo runs foo in a subshell, while bang alone shells out."

/shel/

[orig. Multics techspeak, widely propagated via UNIX]

n. 1. [techspeak] The command interpreter used to pass commands to an operating system; so called because it is the part of the operating system that interfaces with the outside world.

2. More generally, any interface program that mediates access to a special resource or server for convenience, efficiency, or security reasons; for this meaning, the usage is usually 'a shell around' whatever. This sort of program is also called a 'wrapper'.

/shelf-wer/

n. Software purchased on a whim (by an individual user) or in accordance with policy (by a corporation or government agency), but not actually required for any particular use. Therefore, it often ends up on some shelf.