3 new (?) words

[Elaine -HFB- Ashton]

James A. Landau [JJJRLandau at AOL.COM] quoth:
*>
*>I had never before seen "DOS" (meaning MS-DOS) used as a verb, but on a
*>technical mailing list this week I saw "your file had been dossed."  What
*>happens is that MS-DOS (and WINDOWS) use a different convention for ending
*>each record of a file than do the various flavors of UNIX.  Actually I think

Actually, it's the ending for each line; DOS uses CRLF [ carriage return
line feed ], Unix uses LF [ line feed ] and MacOS uses CR [ carriage
return ].

Most Unix OS have 'dos2unix' and 'unix2dos' commands to do the conversion.

*>the writer misused the term, as it implies that the file was CONVERTED to DOS
*>format, and apparently he meant to say that the file had been CREATED in DOS
*>format and never converted to UNIX format.

I don't think it's in use among technical professionals since DOS
also means "Denial of Service" which is a form of hacking. From the Jargon
File:

"DoS attack //

[Usenet,common; note that it's unrelated to `DOS' as name of an operating
system] Abbreviation for Denial-Of-Service attack. This abbreviation is
most often used of attempts to shut down newsgroups with floods of spam,
or to flood network links with large amounts of traffic, or to flood
network links with large amounts of traffic, often by abusing network
broadcast addresses. Compare slashdot effect."

So had the person said "X has been dossed" on a technical list, it would
have been assumed to have a completely different meaning.

e.