< jargon , memory management > A small piece of data inserted in order to achieve a desired memory alignment or other addressing property.
For example, the PDP-11 Unix linker , in split I&D (instructions and data) mode, inserts a two- byte shim at location 0 in data space so that no data object will have an address of 0 (and be confused with the C null pointer).
See also loose bytes .
[ Jargon File ]
(1994-12-21)