break

1. To cause to be broken (in any sense). "Your latest patch

to the editor broke the paragraph commands."

2. (Of a program) To stop temporarily, so that it may

debugged. The place where it stops is a "breakpoint".

3. To send an EIA-232 break (two character widths of line

high) over a serial line.

4. [Unix] To strike whatever key currently causes the tty

driver to send SIGINT to the current process. Normally,

break, delete or control-C does this.

5. "break break" may be said to interrupt a conversation (this

is an example of verb doubling). This usage comes from radio

communications, which in turn probably came from landline

telegraph/teleprinter usage, as badly abused in the Citizen's

Band craze a few years ago.

6. pipeline break.

[Jargon File]