Unixism

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)