[Nottingham] POSIX

[developr]

On Tuesday 18 February 2003 14:32, Gareth Harcombe-Minson wrote:
> Hi, i'm not sure if anyone has heard of this (I've not really) but does
> anyone know what POSIX is?
>
> I know it's related to UNIX... (I need knowledge of it for a job i'm
> going for).
>
> Thanks,
>
> Gareth.
Get ready for the deluge Gareth ...
Basically a set of standards defined by the IEEE.

To quote from the world-recognised and sadly deceased UNIX programming mentor 
W. Richard Stevens

"Posix is an acronym for 'Portable Operating System Interface'.  Posix is not 
a single standard, but a family of standards being developed by the Institute 
for Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc., normally called the IEEE."

"The first of the Posix Standards was IEEE Std 1003.1-1988 and it specified 
the C language interface into a Unix-like kernel covering the following 
areas: process primitives(fork, exec, signals, timers), the environment of a 
process (user IDs, process groups), files and directories (all the I/O 
functions), terminal I/O, the system databases (password file and group 
file), and the tar and cpio archive formats"

(UNIX NETWORK PROGRAMMING Volume 1 p24 isbn 0-13-490012-X
Simply the best books on UNIX system programming ever likely to be written)

Linux aspires to be a POSIX compliant OS.