bang path

1. communications An old-style UUCP electronic-mailaddress naming a sequence of hosts through which a message

must pass to get from some assumed-reachable location to the

addressee (a "source route"). So called because each hop

is signified by a bang sign (exclamation mark). Thus, for

example, the path

...!bigsite!foovax!barbox!me

directs people to route their mail to computer bigsite

(presumably a well-known location accessible to everybody) and

from there through the computer foovax to the account of user

me on barbox.

Before autorouting mailers became commonplace, people often

published compound bang addresses using the convention

(see glob) to give paths from *several* big computers, in

the hope that one's correspondent might be able to get mail to

one of them reliably. e.g.

...!seismo, ut-sally, ihnp4!rice!beta!gamma!me

Bang paths of 8 to 10 hops were not uncommon in 1981.

Late-night dial-up UUCP links would cause week-long

transmission times. Bang paths were often selected by both

transmission time and reliability, as messages would often get

lost.

2. operating system A shebang.

(1998-05-06)