swab

swab

1. Med

a. a small piece of cotton, gauze, etc., for use in applying medication, cleansing a wound, or obtaining a specimen of a secretion, etc.

b. the specimen so obtained

2. a mop for cleaning floors, decks, etc.

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swab [swäb]

(mining engineering)

A pistonlike device provided with a rubber cap ring that is used to clean out debris inside a borehole or casing.

The act of cleaning the inside of a tubular object with a swab.

(petroleum engineering)

In petroleum drilling, to pull the drill string so rapidly that the drill mud is sucked up and overflows the collar of the borehole, thus leaving an undesirably empty borehole.

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swab - /swob/ The PDP-11 swap byte instruction mnemonic, as immortalised in the dd option "conv=swab". 1. To solve the NUXI problem by swapping bytes in a file. 2. The program in V7 Unix used to perform this action, or anything functionally equivalent to it. See also big-endian, little-endian, middle-endian, bytesexual.