unixism n.
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.