Munge
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In computing, "munge" is a term meaning to transform data in an undefined or unexplained manner. It can also mean to obfuscate an email address in order to thwart e-mail harvesting robots or other spam-related systems or people.
The root meaning may have come from the early 1980s, when Mung was used as an editor command in TECO, on RSTS/E operating systems running on PDP-11 hardware. Mung would execute a script of editor commands, and the results were often quite mysterious to inexperienced users. These systems were common in universities, and the meaning could have spread from there.
