Useful
x86 assembly instruction that basically
"calls" the next opcode as a
subroutine, thus
causing the current address to be pushed onto the
stack.
The next instruction would likely be a "pop ebx" or "pop ebp", causing ebx or ebp to contain the address of that instruction. Used cleverly, you can now make your code totally position-independent, by offseting all addresses with ebx (or ebp). (of course, you have now "wasted" a precious register)
Very often seen in computer viruses, since many of these must be able to attach to a target host on (at compile-time) unknown addresses. I also believe that the FreeBSD a.out shared libraries use something to this effect. On a wild guess, GCC has an option -fPIC which perhaps does something like this?