Definitions for magic cookie
This page provides all possible meanings and translations of the word magic cookie
A token or short packet of data passed between communicating programs, used to identify a particular event or transaction; the data is typically not meaningful to the recipient program and not usually interpreted until the recipient passes the data back to the sender or another program at a later time.
Origin: By analogy with fortune cookie.
A magic cookie, or just cookie for short, is a token or short packet of data passed between communicating programs, where the data is typically not meaningful to the recipient program. The contents are opaque and not usually interpreted until the recipient passes the cookie data back to the sender or perhaps another program at a later time. The cookie is often used like a ticket – to identify a particular event or transaction. In some cases, recipient programs are able to meaningfully compare two cookies for equality.
The New Hacker's Dictionary
[Unix; common] 1. Something passed between routines or programs that enables the receiver to perform some operation; a capability ticket or opaque identifier. Especially used of small data objects that contain data encoded in a strange or intrinsically machine-dependent way. E.g., on non-Unix OSes with a non-byte-stream model of files, the result of ftell(3) may be a magic cookie rather than a byte offset; it can be passed to fseek(3), but not operated on in any meaningful way. The phrase it hands you a magic cookie means it returns a result whose contents are not defined but which can be passed back to the same or some other program later. 2. An in-band code for changing graphic rendition (e.g., inverse video or underlining) or performing other control functions (see also cookie). Some older terminals would leave a blank on the screen corresponding to mode-change magic cookies; this was also called a glitch (or occasionally a turd; compare mouse droppings). See also cookie.
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"magic cookie." Definitions.net. STANDS4 LLC, 2015. Web. 29 Jan. 2015. <http://www.definitions.net/definition/magic cookie>.