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Linuxism is a term used colloquially in software development circles when considering porting software from the Linux operating system to other Unix or Unix-like operating systems. Generally it refers to software patterns or practices that depend on idiosyncrasies or characteristics of Linux.
In some cases, Linuxisms could be considered poor practice — like any technique that makes unreasonable assumptions about the capabilities provided by the operating system, it leads to reduced portability.
Examples
* The killall utility on Linux systems has the semantics of killing all processes matching a given command name, while Solaris killall really kills all processes currently running. Solaris (version 7 or greater) instead uses pkill to kill processes by name.
* The Single Unix Specification specifies that the du command implement a -H option to calculate disk usage for link references specified on the command line, while the du implemented in GNU coreutils, found on Linux systems, does not implement this behaviour with this option.
* The Gnucap circuit analysis software's configure script (as of version 0.31) references directly by shebang /bin/bash, even though the script is not bash-dependent. Bash is the typical shell found on Linux systems, but as bash is not part of the Single Unix Specification, is not included in other Unix or Unix-like systems by default.
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