meaning of wheel
1. wheel [slang "big wheel" for a powerful person] A person who has an active wheel bit. "We need to find a wheel to unwedge the hung tape drives. " See wedged. [Jargon File] wheel bit A privilege bit that allows the possessor to perform some restricted operation on a time-sharing system, such as read or write any file on the system regardless of protections, change or look at any address in the running monitor, crash or reload the system, and kill or create jobs and user accounts. The term was invented on the TENEX operating system, and carried over to TOPS-20, XEROX-IFS, and others. The state of being in a privileged logon is sometimes called "wheel mode". This term entered the Unix culture from TWENEX in the mid-1980s and has been gaining popularity there especially at university sites. See also root. wheel wars [Stanford University] A period in larval stage during which student hackers hassle each other by attempting to log each other out of the system, delete each others files, and otherwise wreak havoc, usually at the expense of the lesser users. [Jargon File] When Its Done
2. a wheeled vehicle that has two wheels and is moved by foot pedals
Related Words
wheel | wheel and axle | wheel around | wheel bug | wheel horse | wheel lock | wheel tree | wheelbarrow | wheelbase | wheelchair | wheeled | wheeled vehicle | wheeler | wheeler dealer | wheeler peak | wheelhouse | wheeling | wheelless | wheels | wheelwork | wheelwright |
