EOL
Abbreviation with 2 meanings
| Stands for | End of life |
|---|---|
| Meanings | 2 |
| Categories | Technology & Computing |
EOL has two meanings. It stands for End of life (software) or End of line (programming).
Meanings of EOL at a glance
| # | EOL stands for | Context |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | End of life | Technology & Computing › Software |
| 2 | End of line | Technology & Computing › Programming |
1. End of life
Technology & Computing · Software Abbreviations
Date after which a vendor stops selling, supporting or patching a product. Running EOL software leaves systems exposed to unpatched vulnerabilities and may breach compliance rules such as PCI DSS.
Example: Windows 10 reached EOL on October 14, 2025, so unpatched PCs should be upgraded or enrolled in ESU.
Vendors often distinguish several stages: end of sale, end of mainstream support (no new features) and end of extended support (no security fixes), the last sometimes abbreviated EOS. Microsoft's own wording is "end of support". The community site endoflife.date tracks lifecycles for hundreds of products. In text files, EOL also means end of line.
2. End of line
Technology & Computing · Programming Abbreviations
The character or characters that mark the end of a line of text: a line feed (LF) on Unix, Linux and macOS, and a carriage return plus line feed (CRLF) on Windows. Mismatched line endings cause noisy diffs and broken scripts.
Example: Git converted the EOL characters, so the shell script now fails with a bad interpreter error.
Git's core.autocrlf setting and .gitattributes files control line-ending conversion between platforms. Classic Mac OS used a lone carriage return until Mac OS X. In software lifecycles EOL means end of life, the date after which a product gets no updates; text-processing context points to the line-ending meaning.
Related abbreviations
More software abbreviations
- DCO – Developer Certificate of Origin
- DLL – Dynamic-link library
- DRM – Digital rights management
- EE – Enterprise Edition
- ESR – Extended Support Release
- ESU – Extended Security Updates
- EULA – End-user license agreement
- FLOSS – Free/libre and open-source software
See all 70 software abbreviations →