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and do make use of arbitrarily-powerful shell features.) Sharchives are also commonly referred to as 'shar files' after the name of the most common program for generating them. |
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Share and enjoy! imp. 1. Commonly found at the end of software release announcements and README files, this phrase indicates allegiance to the hacker ethic of free information sharing (see hacker ethic, sense 1). 2. The motto of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation (the ultimate gaggle of incompetent suits) in Douglas Adams's Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The irony of using this as a cultural recognition signal appeals to freeware hackers. |
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shareware /sheir'weir/ n. A kind of 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 also careware, charityware, crippleware, FRS, guiltware, postcardware, and -ware; compare payware. |
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shelfware /shelf'weir/ 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. |
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shell [orig. Multics n. techspeak, widely propagated via Unix] 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. 3. A skeleton program, created by hand or by another program (like, say, a parser generator), which provides the necessary incantations to set up some task and the control flow to drive it (the term driver is sometimes used synonymously). The user is meant to fill in whatever code is needed to get real work done. This usage is common in the AI and Microsoft Windows worlds, and confuses Unix hackers. |
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Historical note: Apparently, the original Multics shell (sense 1) was so called because it was a shell (sense 3); it ran user programs not by starting up separate processes, but by dynamically linking the programs into its own |
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