In a computer or

data transmission Data transmission and data reception or, more broadly, data communication or digital communications is the transfer and reception of data in the form of a digital bitstream or a digitized analog signal transmitted over a point-to-point o ...

system, to abort means to terminate, usually in a controlled manner, a processing activity because it is impossible or undesirable for the activity to proceed or in conjunction with an error. Such an action may be accompanied by

diagnostic Diagnosis is the identification of the nature and cause of a certain phenomenon. Diagnosis is used in many different disciplines, with variations in the use of logic, analytics, and experience, to determine " cause and effect". In systems engine ...

information on the aborted process. In addition to being a verb, abort also has two noun senses. In the most general case, the event of aborting can be referred to as an abort. Sometimes the event of aborting can be given a special name, as in the case of an abort involving a

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

kernel Kernel may refer to: Computing * Kernel (operating system), the central component of most operating systems * Kernel (image processing), a matrix used for image convolution * Compute kernel, in GPGPU programming * Kernel method, in machine lea ...

where it is known as a

kernel panic A kernel panic (sometimes abbreviated as KP) is a safety measure taken by an operating system's kernel upon detecting an internal fatal error in which either it is unable to safely recover or continuing to run the system would have a highe ...

. Specifically in the context of

, an abort is a function invoked by a sending station to cause the recipient to discard or ignore all

bit The bit is the most basic unit of information in computing and digital communications. The name is a portmanteau of binary digit. The bit represents a logical state with one of two possible values. These values are most commonly represented a ...

sequences transmitted by the sender since the preceding flag sequence. In the

C programming language ''The C Programming Language'' (sometimes termed ''K&R'', after its authors' initials) is a computer programming book written by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, the latter of whom originally designed and implemented the language, as well as ...

, abort() is a standard library function that terminates the current application and returns an error code to the host environment.

References

{{compu-stub Computing terminology

See also

References