1. < communications > An old-style UUCP electronic-mail address naming a sequence of hosts through which a message must pass to get from some assumed-reachable location to the addressee (a " source route "). So called because each hop is signified by a bang sign (exclamation mark). Thus, for example, the path
...!bigsite!foovax!barbox!me
directs people to route their mail to computer bigsite (presumably a well-known location accessible to everybody) and from there through the computer foovax to the account of user me on barbox.
Before autorouting mailer s became commonplace, people often published compound bang addresses using the convention (see glob ) to give paths from *several* big computers, in the hope that one's correspondent might be able to get mail to one of them reliably. e.g.
...! seismo, ut-sally, ihnp4 !rice!beta!gamma!me
Bang paths of 8 to 10 hops were not uncommon in 1981. Late-night dial-up UUCP links would cause week-long transmission times. Bang paths were often selected by both transmission time and reliability, as messages would often get lost.
2. A shebang .
(1998-05-06)