:secondary damage: n. When a fatal error occurs (esp. a
{segfault}) the immediate cause may be that a pointer has been
trashed due to a previous {fandango on core}. However, this
fandango may have been due to an *earlier* fandango, so no
amount of analysis will reveal (directly) how the damage occurred.
"The data structure was clobbered, but it was secondary damage."
By extension, the corruption resulting from N cascaded
fandangoes on core is `Nth-level damage'. There is at least
one case on record in which 17 hours of {grovel}ling with
`adb' actually dug up the underlying bug behind an instance of
seventh-level damage! The hacker who accomplished this
near-superhuman feat was presented with an award by his fellows.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
fandango on core: [UNIX/C hackers, from the Mexican dance] n.
In C, a wild pointer that runs out of bounds, causing a {core
dump}, or corrupts the `malloc(3)' {arena} in such a way as
to cause mysterious failures later on, is sometimes said to have
`done a fandango on core'....
aliasing bug: n. A class of subtle programming errors that can
arise in code that does dynamic allocation, esp. via
`malloc(3)' or equivalent. If several pointers address
(`aliases for') a given hunk of storage, it may happen that the
storage is freed or reallocated (and thus moved) through one alias
and then referenced through another, which may lead to subtle (and
possibly intermittent) lossage depending on the state and the
allocation history of the malloc {arena}....
fandango on core n.
[Unix/C hackers, from the Iberian
dance] In C a wild pointer that runs out of bounds, causing a
core dump, or corrupts the malloc(3) arena in such
a way as to cause mysterious failures later on, is sometimes said
to have `done a fandango on core'....
