POSIX 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. They are formally designated as IEEE 1003 and the international standard name is ISO/IEC 9945. The standards emerged from a project, begun circa 1985. The term POSIX was suggested by Richard Stallman (not as a compliment) in response to an IEEE request for a memorable name; before that the standards effort was called IEEE-IX. POSIX has been backronymed to Portable Operating System Interface, with the X signifying the Unix heritage of the API.

Overview

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POSIX specifies the user and software interfaces to the OS in some 15 different documents. The standard user command line and scripting interface is commonly implemented with the Korn shell. Other user-level programs, services and utilities include awk, echo, ed, and hundreds of others. 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:

More on [ POSIX ]

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