line eater, the n. obs.
[Usenet] 1. A bug in some now-obsolete versions of the netnews
software that used to eat up to BUFSIZ bytes of the article text.
The bug was triggered by having the text of the article start
with a space or tab. This bug was quickly personified as a
mythical creature called the `line eater', and postings often
included a dummy line of `line eater food'. Ironically, line
eater `food' not beginning with a space or tab wasn't actually
eaten, since the bug was avoided; but if there was a
space or tab before it, then the line eater would eat the food
and the beginning of the text it was supposed to be
protecting. The practice of `sacrificing to the line eater'
continued for some time after the bug had been nailed to the wall, and is
still humorously referred to. The bug itself was still
occasionally reported to be lurking in some mail-to-netnews
gateways as late as 1991. 2. See NSA line eater.