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x
exit
ZZ
D
?
help |
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as the user vainly tries to find the right exit sequence, with the incorrect tries piling up at the end of the message. |
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plonk excl.,vt. [Usenet: possibly influenced by British slang 'plonk' for cheap booze, or 'plonker' for someone behaving stupidly (latter is lit. equivalent to Yiddish 'schmuck')] The sound a newbie makes as he falls to the bottom of a kill file. While it originated in the newsgroup talk.bizarre, this term (usually written "*plonk*") is now (1994) widespread on Usenet as a form of public ridicule. |
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plugh /ploogh/ v. [from the ADVENT game] See xyzzy. |
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plumbing n. [Unix] Term used for shell code, so called because of the prevalence of pipelines that feed the output of one program to the input of another. Under Unix, user utilities can often be implemented or at least prototyped by a suitable collection of pipelines and temp-file grinding encapsulated in a shell script; this is much less effort than writing C every time, and the capability is considered one of Unix's major winning features. A few other OSs such as IBM's VM/CMS support similar facilities. Esp. used in the construction hairy plumbing (see hairy). "You can kluge together a basic spell-checker out of sort(1), comm(1), and tr(1) with a little plumbing." See also tee. |
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PM /P-M/ 1. v. (from 'preventive maintenance') To bring down a machine for inspection or test purposes. See provocative maintenance; see also scratch monkey. 2. n. Abbrev. for 'Presentation Manager', an elephantine OS/2 graphical user interface. |
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pnambic /p -nam'bik/ [Acronym from the scene in the film version of The Wizard of Oz in which the true nature of the wizard is first discovered: "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain."] 1. A stage of development of a process or function that, owing to incomplete implementation or to the complexity of the system, requires human interaction to simulate or replace some or all of the actions, inputs, or outputs of the process or function. 2. Of or pertaining to a process or function whose apparent operations are wholly or partially falsified. 3. Requiring prestidigitization. |
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