flush
<data> To delete something, usually superfluous, or to abort an
operation.
"Flush" was standard ITS terminology for aborting an output operation. One spoke
of the text that would have been printed, but was not, as having been flushed.
It is speculated that this term arose from a vivid image of flushing unwanted
characters by hosing down the internal output buffer, washing the characters
away before they could be printed.
Compare drain.
2. To force temporarily buffered data to be written to more permanent memory.
E.g. flushing buffered disk writes to disk, as with C's standard I/O library
"fflush(3)" call. This sense was in use among BLISS programmers at DEC and on
Honeywell and IBM machines as far back as 1965. Another example of this usage is
flushing a cache on a context switch where modified data stored in the cace
which belongs to one processes must be written out to main memory so that the
cache can be used by another process.
[Jargon File]
(2005-07-18)
Nearby terms:
FLPL « FLUB « Fluegelman, Andrew « flush »
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