unixism

Free On-line Dictionary of Computing

<operating system, jargon> A piece of code or a coding technique that depends on the protected multitasking environment with relatively low process-spawn overhead that exists on virtual-memory Unix systems.

Common Unixisms include: gratuitous use of "fork"; the assumption that certain undocumented but well-known features of 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're willing to give up your time-slice, for example); the assumption that freshly allocated memory is zeroed; and the assumption that fragmentation problems won't arise from never freeing memory.

Compare vaxocentrism. See also New Jersey. [Jargon File]

(1995-02-27)

The Jargon File

A piece of code or a coding technique that depends on the protected multi-tasking environment with relatively low process-spawn overhead that exists on virtual-memory Unix systems. Common unixisms include: gratuitous use of fork(2); the assumption that certain undocumented but well-known features of Unix libraries such as stdio(3) are supported elsewhere; reliance on obscure side-effects of system calls (use of sleep (2) with a 0 argument to clue the scheduler that you're willing to give up your time-slice, for example); the assumption that freshly allocated memory is zeroed; and the assumption that fragmentation problems won't arise from never free()ing memory. Compare vaxocentrism; see also New Jersey.