fandango on core

(Unix/C, from the Mexican dance) In C, a wild pointer that

runs out of bounds, causing a core dump, or corrupts the

malloc arena in such a way as to cause mysterious failures

later on, is sometimes said to have "done a fandango on core".

On low-end personal machines without an MMU, this can

corrupt the operating system itself, causing massive

lossage. Other frenetic dances such as the rhumba, cha-cha,

or watusi, may be substituted.

See aliasing bug, precedence lossage, smash the stack,

memory leak, memory smash, overrun screw, core.

[Jargon File]

(1994-12-16)