WhatIs

/bak-ˈbōn kə-ˈbäl/

n. A group of large-site administrators who pushed through the Great Renaming and reined in the chaos of USENET during most of the 1980s. The cabal mailing list disbanded in late 1988 after a bitter internal catfight, but the net hardly noticed.

/bæk-end/

The back end refers to parts of a computer application or a program's code that allow it to operate and that cannot be accessed by a user. Most data and operating syntax are stored and accessed in the back end of a computer system. Typically the code is comprised of one or more programming languages.

/bak dȯr/

n. A hole in the security of a system deliberately left in place by designers or maintainers. The motivation for this is not always sinister; some operating systems, for example, come out of the box with privileged accounts intended for use by field service technicians or the vendor's maintenance programmers.

Historically, back doors have often lurked in systems longer than anyone expected or planned, and a few have become widely known.

/ȯk/

1. n. [UNIX techspeak] An interpreted language for massaging text data developed by Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan (the name is from their initials). It is characterized by C-like syntax, a declaration-free approach to variable typing and declarations, associative arrays, and field-oriented text processing.

See also Perl.

2. n. Editing term for an expression awkward to manipulate through normal regexp facilities (for example, one containing a newline).

/a-və-ˌtär/

[CMU, Tektronix]

n. Syn. root, superuser. There are quite a few UNIX machines on which the name of the superuser account is avatar rather than root. This quirk was originated by a CMU hacker who disliked the term superuser, and was propagated through an ex-CMU hacker at Tektronix.

/aw-toh-maj'i-klee/ or /aw-toh-maj'i-k*l-ee/

adv. Automatically, but in a way that, for some reason (typically because it is too complicated, or too ugly, or perhaps even too trivial), the speaker doesn't feel like explaining to you.

See magic.

"The C-INTERCAL compiler generates C, then automagically invokes 'cc(1)' to produce an executable."

/aw'to-boh-got'*-foh'bee-*/

n. See bogotify.

/a-(ˌ)tōpär-ˌsek/

n. atto- is the standard SI prefix for multiplication by 10^-18. A parsec (parallax-second) is 3.26 light-years; an attoparsec is thus 3.26*10-18) light equals about 1 inch/sec). This unit is reported to be in use (though probably not very seriously) among hackers in the U.K.

See micro-.

/a-(ˌ)skē ärt/

n. The fine art of drawing diagrams using the ASCII character set (mainly '|', '-', '/', '\', and '+'). Also known as 'character graphics' or 'ASCII graphics'; see also boxology.

=(o,O)=

/as'kee/

[ American Standard Code for Information Interchange ]

n. The predominant character set encoding of present-day computers.

Uses 7 bits for each character, whereas most earlier codes (including an early version of ASCII) used fewer.

This change allowed the inclusion of lowercase letters --- a major win --- but it did not provide for accented letters or any other letterforms not used in English (such as the German sharp-S and the ae-ligature which is a letter in, for example, Norwegian).