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POSIX or "Portable Operating System Interface for uniX" 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 in response to an IEEE request for a memorable name; before that the standards effort was called IEEE-IX.
Overview POSIX specifies the user and software interfaces to the OS in some 15 different documents. The standard user command line and scripting interface was based on 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: A test suite for POSIX accompanies the standard. It is called PCTS or the Posix Conformance Test Suite*. Since the IEEE charges very high rates for POSIX documentation and does not allow on-line publication of the standards, there has been a tendency toward 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*. Although used mainly for Unix systems, the POSIX standard can apply to any operating system. Versions POSIX has had various "upgrades": List of POSIX-compliant operating systems List of systems aiming for POSIX compliance These systems are not certified to be POSIX compatible officially, but they mostly conform to it. See also | ||||||||
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