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-memoryUnix 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)
