panic

n 1: an overwhelming feeling of fear and anxiety [syn: {terror}]

2: sudden mass fear and anxiety over anticipated events; "panic

in the stock market"; "a war scare" [syn: {scare}]

v 1: feel panic; "The students panicked when told that final

exams were less than a week away"

2: cause panic in; fill with panic; "Th mere thought of an

isolation cell panicked the prisoners"

panic

1. What {Unix} does when a critical

internal consistency checks fails in such a way that Unix

cannot continue. The {kernel} attempts to print a short

message on the {console} and write an image of memory into the

{swap area} on disk. This can be analysed later using {adb}.

The kernel will then either wait in a {tight loop} until the

machine is rebooted or will initiate an automatic {reboot}.

{Unix manual page}: panic(8).

2. Action taken by software which discovers some fatal problem

which prevents it from continuing to run.

(1995-03-01)