

2. Sometimes used to describe what communications people call "shift characters", such as the ESC that leads control sequences for many terminals, or the level shift indicators in the old 5-bit Baudot codes.

3. In personal communication, using methods other than electronic mail, such as telephone or snail-mail.


4. Values returned by a function that are not in its "natural" range of return values, but rather signal some kind of exception. Many C functions that normally return a non-negative integer return -1 to indicate failure.

This use confuses "out-of-band" with "out-of-range". It is actually a clear example of in-band signalling since it uses the same "channel" for control and data.

Compare hidden flag, green bytes, fence.

[Jargon File]

Last updated: 2001-04-08

Nearby terms:

outer joinoutline fontout-of-bandoutputoutput deviceOutside Awareness Port

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