Crunch

 CRUNCH v. 1. To process, usually in a time-consuming or complicated
       way. Connotes an essentially trivial operation which is nonetheless
       painful to perform. The pain may be due to the triviality being
       imbedded in a loop from 1 to 1000000000. "FORTRAN programs do
       mostly number crunching." 2. To reduce the size of a file by a
       complicated scheme that produces bit configurations completely
       unrelated to the original data, such as by a Huffman code. (The file
       ends up looking like a paper document would if somebody crunched the
       paper into a wad.) Since such compression usually takes more
       computations than simpler methods such as counting repeated characters
       (such as spaces) the term is doubly appropriate. (This meaning is
       usually used in the construction "file crunch(ing)" to
       distinguish it from "number crunch(ing)".) 3. n. The
       character "#". Usage: used at Xerox and CMU, among other
       places. Other names for "#" include SHARP, NUMBER, HASH,
       PIG-PEN, POUND-SIGN, and MESH. GLS adds: I recall reading somewhere
       that most of these are names for the # symbol IN CONTEXT. The name for
       the sign itself is "octothorp".