WhatIs

/zȯrk-mid/

n. The canonical unit of currency in hacker-written games. This originated in zork but has spread to nethack and is referred to in several other games.

/zȯrk/

n. The second of the great early experiments in computer fantasy gaming; see ADVENT. Originally written on MIT-DM during the late 1970s, later distributed with BSD UNIX and commercialized as The Zork Trilogy by Infocom.

/zȯrch/

1. [TMRC] v. To attack with an inverse heat sink.

2. [TMRC] v. To travel, with v approaching c [that is, with velocity approaching lightspeed -- ESR].

3. [MIT] v. To propel something very quickly.

"The new comm software is very fast; it really zorches files through the network."

4. [MIT] n. Influence. Brownie points. Good karma. The intangible and fuzzy currency in which favors are measured.

"I'd rather not ask him for that just yet; I think I've used up my quota of zorch with him for the week."

/zäm-bē/

[UNIX]

n. A process that has died but has not yet relinquished its process table slot (because the parent process hasn't executed a wait(2) for it yet). These can be seen in ps(1) listings occasionally.

Compare orphan.

/zi-pər-hed/

[IBM]

n. A person with a closed mind.

/zip/

[primarily MS-DOS]

vt. To create a compressed archive from a group of files using PKWare's PKZIP or a compatible archiver. Its use is spreading now that portable implementations of the algorithm have been written. Commonly used as follows:

"I'll zip it up and send it to you."

See arc, tar and feather.

/zi-gə-mȯrf/

n. Hex FF (11111111) when used as a delimiter or fence character. 

Usage: primarily at IBM shops.

/zir-ōth/

adj. First. Among software designers, comes from C's and LISP's 0-based indexing of arrays. Hardware people also tend to start counting at 0 instead of 1; this is natural since, e.g., the 256 states of 8 bits correspond to the binary numbers 0, 1, ..., 255 and the digital devices known as 'counters' count in this way.

/zir-ō kän-tent/

adj. Syn. content-free.

/zir-ō/

vt. 

1. To set to 0. Usually said of small pieces of data, such as bits or words (esp. in the construction zero out).
    

2. To erase; to discard all data from. Said of disks and directories, where zeroing need not involve actually writing zeroes throughout the area being zeroed. One may speak of something being logically zeroed rather than being physically zeroed.

   See scribble.