1. Something passed between routines or programs that enables
the receiver to perform some operation; a
capability ticket
that contain data encoded in a strange or intrinsically
with a non-byte-stream model of files, the result of "
ftell"
may be a magic cookie rather than a byte offset; it can be
passed to "
fseek", but not operated on in any meaningful
way. The phrase "it hands you a magic cookie" means it
returns a result whose contents are not defined but which can
be passed back to the same or some other program later.
2. An in-band code for changing graphic rendition (e.g. inverse
video or underlining) or performing other control functions.
Some older terminals would leave a blank on the screen
corresponding to mode-change magic cookies; this was also
(1995-01-25)