Magic cookie
In computing, a magic cookie, or just cookie for short, is a token or short packet of data passed between communicating programs, where the data is typically not meaningful to the recipient program. The contents are opaque and not usually interpreted until the recipient passes the cookie data back to the sender or perhaps another program at a later time. The cookie is often used like a ticket – to identify a particular event or transaction.[1]
In some cases, recipient programs are able to meaningfully compare two cookies for equality.
Early use
The term magic cookie appears in the man page for the fseek routine in the C standard library, dating back at least to 1979, where it was stated:
- "ftell returns the current value of the offset relative to the beginning of the file associated with the named stream. It is measured in bytes on UNIX; on some other systems it is a magic cookie, and the only foolproof way to obtain an offset for fseek."[2][3]
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See also
References
This article is based on material taken from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing prior to 1 November 2008 and incorporated under the "relicensing" terms of the GFDL, version 1.3 or later.