job

<operating system> All the activities involved in completing any project on a computer from start to finish. A job may involve several processes and several programs.

This term is rather old fashioned and harks back to the days of batch processing where a user would submit his job as a deck of punched cards which would typically include source code interspersed with job control language instructions to guide the various phases of the job such as compilation, linking, execution and printing.

(07 May 1995)