job

operating system All the activities involved in completing

any project on a computer from start to finish. A job may

involve several processes and several programs.

This term is rather old fashioned and harks back to the days

of batch processing where a user would submit his job as a

deck of punched cards which would typically include sourcecode interspersed with job control language instructions to

guide the various phases of the job such as compilation,

linking, execution and printing.

(1995-05-07)