mung
:mung: /muhng/ vt. [in 1960 at MIT, `Mash Until No Good'; sometime after
that the derivation from the recursive acronym
`Mung Until No Good'
became standard; but see munge
1. To make changes to a file, esp.
large-scale and irrevocable changes. See BLT
2. To destroy, usually
accidentally, occasionally maliciously. The system only mungs things
maliciously; this is a consequence of Finagle's Law
. See scribble
mangle
, trash
, nuke
. Reports from Usenet
suggest that the
pronunciation /muhnj/ is now usual in speech, but the spelling `mung' is
still common in program comments (compare the widespread confusion over
the proper spelling of kluge
). 3. In the wake of the spam
epidemics
of the 1990s, mung is now commonly used to describe the act of modifying
an email address in a sig block in a way that human beings can readily
reverse but that will fool an address harvester
Example:
johnNOSPAMsmith@isp.net. 4. The kind of beans the sprouts of which are
used in Chinese food. (That's their real name! Mung beans! Really!)
Like many early hacker terms, this one seems to have originated at
TMRC
it was already in use there in 1958. Peter Samson (compiler of
the original TMRC lexicon) thinks it may originally have been
onomatopoeic for the sound of a relay spring (contact) being twanged.
However, it is known that during the World Wars, `mung' was U.S. army
slang for the ersatz creamed chipped beef better known as `SOS', and it
seems quite likely that the word in fact goes back to Scots-dialect
munge
Jargon File Version 4.3.1, 29 JUN 2001 =
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