leak

programming With a qualifier, one of a class of

resource-management bugs that occur when resources are not

freed properly after operations on them are finished, so they

effectively disappear (leak out). This leads to eventual

exhaustion as new allocation requests come in.

One might refer to, say, a "window handle leak" in a windowsystem.

See memory leak, fd leak.

[Jargon File]

(1995-04-18)