[ale] What does the "shared" mean in the ouput of free

[hirsch at zapmedia.com]

When I run the command 'free' I get something like this:

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        110600     109180       1420          0       8772      27780
-/+ buffers/cache:      72628      37972
Swap:       131504        480     131024

What exactly does "shared" mean?  Is that only memory shared between
processes using shared memory, or does it count libraries that are
shared between programs?

On my laptop I have 128 MB of RAM and I'm swapping like crazy.  I'm
running KDE which is large, but I thought that since almost all my
applications are KDE applications they should share a lot.  Instead I
get almost no "share"d memory.

Am I misunderstanding the meaning of share?

Thanks,

Michael

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