Punic

adj 1: of or relating to or characteristic of ancient Carthage or

its people or their language; "the Punic Wars";

"Carthaginian peace" [syn: {Carthaginian}, {Punic}]

2: tending to betray; especially having a treacherous character

as attributed to the Carthaginians by the Romans; "Punic

faith"; "the perfidious Judas"; "the fiercest and most

treacherous of foes"; "treacherous intrigues" [syn: {perfidious},

{treacherous}]

n : the Phoenician dialect of ancient Carthage [syn: {Punic}]

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)