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flush v.
1. [common] To delete something, usually
superfluous, or to abort an operation. "All that nonsense has
been flushed." 2. [Unix/C] To force buffered I/O to disk, as with
an fflush(3) call. This is not an abort or deletion
as in sense 1, but a demand for early completion! 3. To leave at
the end of a day's work (as opposed to leaving for a meal). "I'm
going to flush now." "Time to flush." 4. To exclude someone
from an activity, or to ignore a person.
`Flush' was standard ITS terminology for aborting an output
operation; one spoke of the text that would have been printed, but
was not, as having been flushed. It is speculated that this term
arose from a vivid image of flushing unwanted characters by hosing
down the internal output buffer, washing the characters away before
they could be printed. The Unix/C usage, on the other hand, was
propagated by the fflush(3) call in C's standard I/O library
(though it is reported to have been in use among BLISS programmers
at DEC and on Honeywell and IBM machines as far back as 1965).
Unix/C hackers found the ITS usage confusing, and vice versa.
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