A magic cookie or just cookie for short, is a token or short packet of data passed between communicating programs, where the data is typically not meaningful to the recipient program. The contents are opaque and not usually interpreted until the recipient passes the cookie data back to the sender or perhaps another program at a later time. The cookie is often used like a ticket — to identify a particular event or transaction.
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1. Something passed between routines or programs that enables the receiver to perform some operation; a
capability ticket or
opaque identifier. Especially used of small data objects that contain data encoded in a strange or intrinsically machine-dependent way. E.g. on non-
Unix operating systems with a non-byte-stream model of files, the result of "
ftell" may be a magic cookie rather than a byte offset; it can be passed to "
fseek", but not operated on in any meaningful way. The phrase "it hands you a magic cookie" means it returns a result whose contents are not defined but which can be passed back to the same or some other program later.
2. An in-band code for changing graphic rendition (e.g. inverse video or underlining) or performing other control functions. Some older terminals would leave a blank on the screen corresponding to mode-change magic cookies; this was also called a
glitch (or occasionally a "turd"; compare
mouse droppings).
See also
cookie.
[
Jargon File]
(1995-01-25)
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