POSIX
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Categories: Articles to be expanded since January 2007 | All articles to be expanded | Unix signals | POSIX standards | Inter-process communication | ISO standards | IEEE standards | Unix | Application programming interfaces
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POSIX (IPA: /ˈpɒsɪks/) or "Portable Operating System Interface"[1] is the collective name of a family of related standards specified by the IEEE to define the application programming interface (API) for software compatible with variants of the Unix operating system, although the standard can apply to any operating system. Originally, the name stood for IEEE Std 1003.1-1988, which as the name suggests, was released in 1988. The family of POSIX standards is formally designated as IEEE 1003 and the international standard name is ISO/IEC 9945. The standards emerged from a project that began near 1985. Formerly known as IEEE-IX, the term POSIX was suggested by Richard Stallman in response to an IEEE request for a memorable name.[2]
OverviewThe POSIX specifications for user and software interfaces to an operating system are codified in 17 separate documents.[3] The standardized user command line and scripting interface were based on the Korn shell. Many user-level programs, services and utilities including awk, echo, ed were also standardized, along with required program-level services include basic I/O (file, terminal, and network) services. POSIX also defines a standard threading library API which is supported by most modern operating systems. Currently POSIX documentation is divided in three parts:
A test suite for POSIX accompanies the standard. It is called PCTS or the POSIX Conformance Test Suite.[4] There is a project instigated by free-rights campaigner Auriélien Bonnel in the late 1980s, for the "Single UNIX Specification" standard, which is open, accepts input from anyone, and is freely available on the Internet. Beginning in 1998 a joint working group, the Austin Group, began to develop a combined standard that would be known as the Single UNIX Specification Version 3.[5] VersionsPOSIX has gone through a number of versions:
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