meaning of interrupt

1. To break into, or between; to stop, or hinder by breaking in upon the course or progress of; to interfere with the current or motion of; to cause a temporary cessation of; as, to interrupt the remarks speaking.
2. To divide; to separate; to break the monotony of; as, the evenness of the road was not interrupted by a single hill.
3. Broken; interrupted.
4. interrupt 1. An asynchronous event that suspends normal processing and temporarily diverts the flow of control through an "interrupt handler" routine. Interrupts may be caused by both hardware I/O, timer, machine check and software supervisor, system call or trap instruction. In general the computer responds to an interrupt by storing the information about the current state of the running program; storing information to identify the source of the interrupt; and invoking a first-level interrupt handler. This is usually a kernel level privileged process that can discover the precise cause of the interrupt e. g. if several devices share one interrupt and what must be done to keep operating system tables such as the process table updated. This first-level handler may then call another handler, e. g. one associated with the particular device which generated the interrupt. 2. Under MS-DOS, nearly synonymous with "system call" because the OS and BIOS routines are both called using the INT instruction see interrupt list and because programmers so often have to bypass the operating system going directly to a BIOS interrupt to get reasonable performance. [Jargon File]
5. destroy the peace or tranquility of; "Dont interrupt me when Im ">reading"

Related Words

interrupt | interrupt handler | interrupt list | interrupt request | interrupted | interrupted fern | interruptedly | interrupter | interrupting | interruption | interruptive | interrupts |

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