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magic cookie: n. [Unix; common] 1. Something passed between routines or programs that enables the
receiver to perform some operation; a capability ticket or opaque
identifier. Especially used of small data objects that contain data
encoded in a strange or intrinsically machine-dependent way. E.g., on
non-Unix OSes with a non-byte-stream model of files, the result of
ftell(3)
may be a magic cookie rather than a byte offset; it can be passed to
fseek(3),
but not operated on in any meaningful way. The phrase it hands you a magic cookie means it returns a
result whose contents are not defined but which can be passed back to the
same or some other program later. 2. An in-band code for changing graphic rendition (e.g., inverse
video or underlining) or performing other control functions (see also
cookie). Some older terminals would leave a blank
on the screen corresponding to mode-change magic cookies; this was also
called a glitch (or occasionally a turd; compare
mouse droppings). See also cookie.
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