Break
1. To cause to be
broken (in any sense).
"Your latest patch to the editor broke the paragraph commands."
2. (Of a program) To stop temporarily, so that it may debugged.
The place where it stops is a "
breakpoint".
3. To send an
EIA-232 break (two character widths of line high) over a
serial line.
4. [Unix] To strike whatever key currently causes the tty driver to send SIGINT to the current process.
Normally, break, delete or
control-C does this.
5. "break break" may be said to interrupt a conversation (this is an example of verb doubling).
This usage comes from radio communications, which in turn probably came from landline telegraph/teleprinter usage, as badly abused in the Citizen's Band craze a few years ago.
6.
pipeline break.
7.
break statement.
[
Jargon File]
