In programming, "housekeeping" isn't a very precise term, but I have heard it enough to think that it has an accepted meaning. To me, it means portions of a program that don't contribute directly to what the program is supposed to be doing, but which are necessary anyway.

You could call initializing a serial port "housekeeping". It's not directly related to the sending/receiving of individual bytes, but it's necessary before you can do so.

Some other examples of "housekeeping" within a program:

• The work done before a C program starts to initialize constants and set (certain parts of) memory to zero.
• The free() you'd darn well better do corresponding to each malloc().
• Closing files

You could also talk about "housekeeping" aspects of the programmer's job. These would be activities that are not actually programming, but which are necessary anyway. Examples: writing documentation, doing revision control, maintaining backups, etc.

-- Russ