<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)
Nearby terms:
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