Unixism

Unixism

(operating system, jargon)A piece of code or a codingtechnique that depends on the protected multitaskingenvironment with relatively low process-spawn overhead thatexists on virtual-memory Unix systems.

Common Unixisms include: gratuitous use of "fork"; theassumption that certain undocumented but well-known featuresof Unix libraries such as "stdio" are supported elsewhere;reliance on obscure side-effects of system calls (use of"sleep" with a 0 argument to tell the scheduler that you'rewilling to give up your time-slice, for example); theassumption that freshly allocated memory is zeroed; and theassumption that fragmentation problems won't arise fromnever freeing memory.

Compare vaxocentrism. See also New Jersey.