Computing, Engineering, Mathematics, Natural sciences, Physical sciences, Programming, Sciences To access the value or object located in a memory location addressed by a pointer or another value interpreted as such; to access a value being referenced by something else.
Attempting to dereference a null pointer often results in a crash.
2
Computing, Engineering, Mathematics, Natural sciences, Physical sciences, Sciences To operate on the file or directory pointed to by a symbolic link, rather than on the link itself.
With the find command, any symbolic links appearing after -follow will be dereferenced.
3
Computing, Engineering, Mathematics, Natural sciences, Physical sciences, Sciences To dissolve a symbolic link by replacing it with a copy of its target.
Either each dereference must use a complicated DCAS protocol, or each pointer must include a version number that is managed on each modification and checked on each dereference, or storage management must be tightly coupled […]1999, Michael Barry Greenwald, Non-blocking synchronization and system design, page 77: