cokebottle

/kohk´bot·l/, n.

Any very unusual character, particularly one you can't type because it isn't on your keyboard. MIT people used to complain about the ‘control-meta-cokebottle’ commands at SAIL, and SAIL people complained right back about the ‘escape-escape-cokebottle’ commands at MIT. After the demise of the space-cadet keyboard, cokebottle faded away as serious usage, but was often invoked humorously to describe an (unspecified) weird or non-intuitive keystroke command. It may be due for a second inning, however. The OSF/Motif window manager, mwm(1), has a reserved keystroke for switching to the default set of keybindings and behavior. This keystroke is (believe it or not) ‘control-meta-bang’ (see bang). Since the exclamation point looks a lot like an upside down Coke bottle, Motif hackers have begun referring to this keystroke as cokebottle. See also quadruple bucky.