Him N. A Small Piece Of Data Inserted In Order To Achieve A Desired Memory Alignment Or Other Addressing Property.

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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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