What is "foobar"

n. 1 (context slang English) A serious mistake. 2 (context computing English) A metasyntactic variable name, a place holder for words; compare foo, bar.

The terms foobar , or foo and others are used as placeholder names (also referred to as metasyntactic variables) in computer programming or computer-related documentation. They have been used to name entities such as variables, functions, and commands whose exact identity is unimportant and serve only to demonstrate a concept.