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shim
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shim /n./ 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.
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