avatar n. Syn.
[in Hindu mythology, the incarnation of a god] 1. Among people
working on virtual reality and cyberspace interfaces, an avatar
is an icon or representation of a user in a shared virtual
reality. The term is sometimes used on MUDs. 2. [CMU, Tektronix] root, superuser.
There are quite a few Unix machines on which the name of the
superuser account is `avatar' rather than `root'. This quirk was
originated by a CMU hacker who found the terms `root' and
`superuser' unimaginative, and thought `avatar' might better
impress people with the responsibility they were accepting.
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awk /awk/
1. n. [Unix techspeak] An interpreted language for massaging
text data developed by Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian
Kernighan (the name derives from their initials). It is
characterized by C-like syntax, a declaration-free approach to
variable typing and declarations, associative arrays, and
field-oriented text processing. See also Perl. 2. n. Editing term for an expression
awkward to manipulate through normal regexp facilities (for example, one containing
a newline). 3. vt. To process data
using awk(1).