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shim

shim: n. A small piece of data inserted in order to achieve a
   desired memory alignment or other addressing property.  For
   example, the PDP-11 UNIX linker, in split I&D (instructions and
   data) mode, inserts a two-byte shim at location 0 in data space so
   that no data object will have an address of 0 (and be confused with
   the C null pointer).  See also loose bytes.