WhatIs

/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.

/sher-wer/

n. 

Freeware (sense 1) for which the author requests some payment, usually in the accompanying documentation files or in an announcement made by the software itself. Such payment may or may not buy additional support or functionality.

See guiltware, crippleware.