WhatIs

/fās tīm/

n. Time spent interacting with somebody face-to-face (as opposed to via electronic links).

"Oh, yeah, I spent some face time with him at the last Usenix."

/fab/

[from 'fabricate']

v. 1. To produce chips from a design that may have been created by someone at another company. Fabbing chips based on the designs of others is the activity of a silicon foundry. To a hacker, 'fab' is practically never short for 'fabulous'.

2. 'fab line': the production system (lithography, diffusion, etching, etc.) for chips at a chip manufacturer. Different 'fab lines' are run with different process parameters, die sizes, or technologies, or simply to provide more manufacturing volume.

/ī-ˌbȯl sərch/

n. To look for something in a mass of code or data with one's own native optical sensors, as opposed to using some sort of pattern matching software like grep or any other automated search tool. Also called a vgrep; compare vdiff, desk check.

/ek-sər-ˌsīz left əz ən/

[from technical books]

Used to complete a proof when one doesn't mind a handwave, or to avoid one entirely. The complete phrase is:

"The proof (or the rest) is left as an exercise for the reader."

This comment *has* occasionally been attached to unsolved research problems by authors possessed of either an evil sense of humor or a vast faith in the capabilities of their audiences.

/eg-zek'/

vt.,n. 1. [UNIX: from 'execute'] Synonym for chain, derives from the 'exec(2)' call.

2. [from 'executive'] obs. The command interpreter for an OS (see shell); term esp. used around mainframes, and prob. derived from UNIVAC's archaic EXEC 2 and EXEC 8 operating systems.

3. At IBM, the equivalent of a shell command file (among VM/CMS users).

/eks'ee/ or /eek'see/ or /E-X-E/

n. An executable binary file. Some operating systems (notably MS-DOS, VMS, and TWENEX) use the extension .EXE to mark such files. This usage is also occasionally found among UNIX programmers even though UNIX executables don't have any required suffix.

/eks'kl/

n. Abbreviation for 'exclamation point'.

See bang, shriek, ASCII.

/eks'ch*/ or /eksch/

vt. To exchange two things, each for the other; to swap places. If you point to two people sitting down and say "Exch!", you are asking them to trade places. EXCH, meaning EXCHange, was originally the name of a PDP-10 instruction that exchanged the contents of a register and a memory location. Many newer hackers tend to be thinking instead of the PostScript exchange operator (which is usually written in lowercase).

/ig-ˈza-məniŋ t͟hə en-ˌtrālz/

n. The process of grovelling through a core dump or hex image in the attempt to discover the bug that brought a program or system down.

Compare runes, incantation, black art, desk check.

/ek's*/

[SI] pref. See quantifiers.