Differences between current version and predecessor to the previous major change of POSIX.
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| Newer page: | version 17 | Last edited on Saturday, February 28, 2009 9:49:33 am | by LawrenceDoliveiro | |
| Older page: | version 15 | Last edited on Thursday, September 2, 2004 1:07:25 am | by StuartYeates | Revert |
@@ -1,24 +1,26 @@
Acronym for __P__ortable __O__perating __S__ystem __I__nterface Uni__X__.
-[ISO]/IEC 9945 / IEEE Std 1003.1-1988.
+[ISO]/IEC 9945 / [
IEEE]
Std 1003.1-1988.
-An attempt to define a standard interface for all [UNIX] systems from different vendors and fight the "[BSD] vs. System V" split and the tendancy
of commercial operating systems to fragment and diverge.
+An attempt to define a standard interface for all [UNIX] systems from different vendors and fight the "[BSD] vs. System V" split and the tendency
of commercial operating systems to fragment and diverge.
POSIX is a large (some might even say unwieldy) standard (officially [IEEE] Standard 1003) specifying things such as the behaviour (arguments, etc) of standard programs and utilities that must exist on a system and [C] library functions. The theory is that if you write a program that conforms to POSIX standards, it will compile and run on any POSIX-compliant operating system.
-The current standard is avaliable
at: http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/ but is not for re-distribution. There is also [special permission|http://standards.ieee.org/announcements/pr_linuxman.html] for extracts from the (copyrighted) standard to be used in Linux manual pages.
+The current standard is available
at: http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/ but is not for re-distribution. There is also [special permission|http://standards.ieee.org/announcements/pr_linuxman.html] for extracts from the (copyrighted) standard to be used in Linux manual pages.
It used to be significantly harder for individuals to get copies of the standard, leading to comments such as
+<pre>
/*
* ok, as I hadn't got any other source of information about
* possible error numbers, I was forced to use the same numbers
* as minix.
* Hopefully these are posix or something. I wouldn't know (and posix
* isn't telling me - they want $$$ for their f***ing standard).
...
*/
+</pre>
in errno.h from the Linux kernel (version 0.01).
----
@@ -42,8 +44,9 @@
----
As an example what it was like trying to standardise the different functionality of the different unices, consider this from the documentation for gettext(1):
+<pre>
There are two competing methods for language independent messages:
the X/Open `catgets' method, and the Uniforum `gettext' method. The
`catgets' method indexes messages by integers; the `gettext' method
indexes them by their English translations. The `catgets' method has
@@ -58,8 +61,9 @@
so no messaging system was included as part of the standard. I believe
the informative annex of the standard includes the XPG3 messaging
interfaces, "...as an example of a messaging system that has been
implemented..."
+</pre>
----
[POSIX] compliant systems include:
@@ -68,11 +72,11 @@
# [MacOSX]
# [Debian]
# [RedHat]
# [AIX]
-# [AddToMe
]
+# [MicrosoftWindows
] (with addons)
...
Note that the Linux kernel itself is not a full [POSIX] system, because a full system includes things like awk(1) and vi(1).
----
CategoryStandards
