Online Computer Terms Dictionary - L

leak

<programming> With a qualifier, one of a class of resource-management bugs that occur when resources are not freed properly after operations on them are finished, so they effectively disappear (leak out). This leads to eventual exhaustion as new allocation requests come in.

One might refer to, say, a "window handle leak" in a window system.

See memory leak, fd leak.

[Jargon File]

(1995-04-18)