May 15, 2003

print

v.

To output, even if to a screen. If a hacker says that a program printed a message, he means this; if he refers to printing a file, he probably means it in the conventional sense of writing to a hardcopy device (compounds like ‘print job’ and ‘printout’, on the other hand, always refer to the latter). This very common term is likely a holdover from the days when printing terminals were the norm, perpetuated by programming language constructs like C's printf3. See senses 1 and 2 of tty.

Posted by Jargon File at May 15, 2003 10:33 AM

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