Linux Jargon

http://slides.lucywyman.me/linux-jargon.html

Hacker

“A human who engages in activities (such as programming or other media) in a spirit of playfulness and exploration” ~ Wikipedia

Conversational Acronyms

• AFAIK - as far as I know
• AFK - away from keyboard
• IIRC - if I recall correctly
• IMHO - in my humble opinion
• TLA - three letter acronym
• YMMV - your mileage may vary

Technical Acronyms

• API - Application Programming Interface
• BSD - Berkley Software Distribution
• CLI - Command Line Interface
• [D]DOS - [Distributed] Denial of Service
• DHCP - Dynamic Host Control Protocol
• DNS - Domain Name System
• EMACS - Editing MACroS - inferior text editor
• EO[F | L | D | M] - End of [file | line | day | message]

Technical Acronyms

• FIFO - First In First Out
• GCC - Gnu Compiler Collection
• GNU - Gnu’s Not Unix
• GUI - Graphical User Interface
• INTERCAL - Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym
• ISP - Internet Service Provider
• [K | M]IPS - [Kilo | Mega] Instructions Per Second

Technical Acronyms

• MOTD - Message of the Day
• RTFM - Read the cussing manual
• TTY - Teletype terminal
• VIM - Vi iMproved, superior text editor
• WYSIWYG - What you see is what you get
• YAOURT - Yet AnOther User Repository Tool. CLI for pacman, arch linux package manager

Security Acronyms

• PGP - Pretty Good Privacy. Data encryption program + standard
• GPG - Gnu Privacy Guard. Open source implementation of PGP
• RSA - 3 really smart dudes names. Public key cryptosystem
• SHA - Secure Hash Algorithm. For hashing things. Like browns. Hash browns.
• DH - Diffie-Hellman. Secure key exchange

Directories

• /bin - User binaries (things you run)
• /dev - Device files (terminal, usb, ram, etc.)
• /etc - Configurations for installed programs
• /home - Where your personal files are stored
• /lib - Library files to support installed binaries
• /opt - Additional applications
• /proc - Information about system processes
• /root - Root user’s home directory
• /sbin - System binaries (things your system runs)
• /tmp - Temporary files
• /usr - Binaries, libraries, docs, and source code for programs you install
• /var - Files that are expected to grow (logs, backups, cache, etc.)

Technical Words

• Backdoor - A hole or “way in” to a secure system deliberately placed, usually by developers
• [Big | Little]-endian - Whether the most significant bit is at the lowest (Big-endian) or highest (little-endian) address.
• Daemon - A process that runs in the background
• Fork bomb - A program which creates two versions of itself upon startup, growing exponentially until you run out of memory
• Partition - “The creation of one or more regions on a hard disk or other secondary storage, so that an operating system can manage information in each region separately.”

Technical Words

• POSIX - A family of API standards which maintain compatibility between operating systems
• Quine - A program which outputs itself (and only itself)
• Raid configuration - combines multiple physical disk drives into a single logical unit
• Rot13 - Cipher which rotates the alphabet 13 places
• Sudo - Superuser do
• Unix - A family of computer operating systems derived from AT&T Unix
• X11 - A windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix systems

Work Culture Words

• Astroturfing - “The use of paid shills to create the impression of a popular movement”
• Bikeshedding - “Technical disputes over minor, marginal issues conducted while more serious ones are being overlooked”
• Capture the Flag (CTF) - A contest in which participants try to hack into a system to retrieve a “flag” (on purpose)
• Code monkey - Passionless code producer
• Copyleft - GPL - The GNU General Public License

Work Culture Words

• Dogfooding - Using software internally for testing
• Foo/bar/baz - Placeholder words
• Grok - To understand something all the way through, or very well
• Halt and Catch Fire - Machine code instruction that causes meaningful operation to stop
• Heisenbug - A bug that only appears sometimes, intended to drive developers insane

Work Culture Words

• Idempotent - An element that acts the same if used once as when used multiple times
• Lorem ipsum - Paragraph text used as a placeholder
• Nibble - 4 bits
• Script kiddie
• Syntactic sugar - Features added to a language to make it more human readable
• XKCD mouse
• Yak shaving A task that leads you to perform another related task and so on, and so on — all distracting you from your original goal.
• Zero day - An undisclosed vulnerability that can be exploited

Punctuation

• Bang - !
• Hat - ^
• Splat or star - *
• Hash or octothorp - #

Stuff to know

• All your base are belong to us - A poor Japanese to English translation in the opening scenes of Zero Wing
• The magic switch
• hunter2
• Hackers (1995) - “Should have been titled Crackers, because cracking is what the movie was about. It’s understandable that they didn’t however; titles redolent of snack food are probably a tough sell in Hollywood.”
• This StackOverflow post
• The Evil Bit (RFC 3514)

Stuff to know

• Obfuscated C Contest
• RFC 1149
• Konami code
• And of course, XKCD

Resources

• The Jargon File (This page)
• Linux Dictionary