meaning of magic cookie
1. magic cookie 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 operating systems with a non-byte-stream model of files, the result of "ftell" may be a magic cookie rather than a byte offset; it can be passed to "fseek", 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. invers video or underlining or performing other control functions. 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. [Jargon File]
Related Words
