Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun jargon Any small device or object (usually hand-sized) which can be manipulated.
  • verb jargon To manipulate objects considered to be frobs.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

It was adopted by the community of computer programmers which grew out of the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club in the 1950s, and allegedly among the oldest existing words in hacker jargon.

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Examples

  • “The specified frob does not exist or has already been used.”

    Scripting News for 11/12/07 « Scripting News Annex 2007

  • I spent most of today trying to understand, again, what a token is and a frob and how they relate.

    Scripting News for 11/12/07 « Scripting News Annex 2007

  • When I call flickr. auth.getToken with a frob returned by flickr. auth.getFrob, I get error code 108: Invalid frob.

    Scripting News for 11/12/07 « Scripting News Annex 2007

  • Frobnicate (Often abbreviated to frob): To manipulate, adjust or tweak something, as in "Please frob the light switch."

    Live Wires 2008

  • You first need to frob the blurble and then blah blah blah blah.

    Site Home Raymond Chen - MSFT 2011

  • I'm hitting a problem with SHFileOperation when using it to frob files in the gonzo directory when the user's SID ends in an odd number.

    The Old New Thing oldnewthing 2010

  • Or if you have some common cases you can mention them in patterns: foo 5 = frob 5 foo x = frob x

    Netvouz - new bookmarks 2010

  • The sunrays were "bear" in various languages (oso, medved, ursa), and later they had words from the hacker's dictionary (foo, bar, baz, frob)

    Slashdot 2009

  • Of course, as these things go, I fully expect that someone will tell me "install the Blahonga module and you get it" or "buh, all you need to to is to frob around in the config and it's there!" and that would be fine, too.

    Planet Lisp 2009

  • But when I try to upload using kflicker it fails to authenicate with an "invalid frob" error.

    PCLinuxOS-Forums 2008

Comments

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  • To manipulate knobs and controls on an electronic object to see what they do (according to NPR's Says You).

    October 25, 2014