< operating system > All the activities involved in completing any project on a computer from start to finish. A job may involve several processes and several programs.
This term is rather old fashioned and harks back to the days of batch processing where a user would submit his job as a deck of punched card s which would typically include source code interspersed with job control language instructions to guide the various phases of the job such as compilation, linking, execution and printing.
(1995-05-07)