The New Hacker's Dictionary

plonk // excl.,vt.

[Usenet: possibly influenced by British slang 'plonk' for cheap booze, or 'plonker' for someone behaving stupidly (latter is lit. equivalent to Yiddish 'schmuck')] The sound a newbie makes as he falls to the bottom of a kill file. While it originated in the newsgroup talk.bizarre, this term (usually written "*plonk*") is now (1994) widespread on Usenet as a form of public ridicule.

plug-and-pray // adj.,vi.

Parody of the techspeak term 'plug-and-play', describing a PC peripheral card which is claimed to have no need for hardware configuration via DIP switches, and which should be work as soon as it is inserted in the PC. Unfortunately, even the PCI bus is not up to pulling this off reliably, and people who have to do installation or troubleshoot PCs soon find themselves longing for the DIP switches.

plugh /ploogh/ v.

[from the ADVENT game] See xyzzy.

plumbing // n.

[Unix] Term used for shell code, so called because of the prevalence of 'pipelines' that feed the output of one program to the input of another. Under Unix, user utilities can often be implemented or at least prototyped by a suitable collection of pipelines and temp-file grinding encapsulated in a shell script; this is much less effort than writing C every time, and the capability is considered one of Unix's major winning features. A few other OSs such as IBM's VM/CMS support similar facilities. esp. used in the construction 'hairy plumbing' (see hairy). "You can kluge together a basic spell-checker out of sort(1), comm(1), and tr(1) with a little plumbing." See also tee.

PM /P-M/

1. v. (from 'preventive maintenance') To bring down a machine for inspection or test purposes. See provocative maintenance; see also scratch monkey.

2. n. abbrev. for 'Presentation Manager', an elephantine OS/2 graphical user interface.

pnambic /p*-nam'bik/

[Acronym from the scene in the film version of "The Wizard of Oz" in which the true nature of the wizard is first discovered: "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain."]