+++Date last modified: 05-Jul-1997

Posix is the common name for IEEE Standard 1003.1-1988, the IEEE Portable
Operating System Interface for Computing Environments. It was published as an
ANSI standard in 1988 and by ISO in 1990 as IEEE Std. 1003.1-1990. Posix
defines a standard way for an application program to obtain basic services
from the operating system. More specifically, Posix describes a set of
functions derived from a combination of AT&T Unix Sys.V and BSD Unix. All
Posix-conforming systems must implement these functions and programs that
follow the Posix standard use only these functions to obtain services from
the OS and underlying hardware.

You'll often see discussions of Posix.N, where "N" is some number from 0 to
11. These are specific sections of the standard, as follows:

Posix.0     Is not a standard, but an introduction to the following
standards.

Posix.1     Defines the interface between portable applications and the
operating system. The API is defined in terms of a superset of
ISO/IEC 9899:1990 (ANSI) standard C.

Posix.2     Specifies a shell command language based on the Unix SysV
shell with elements of the C and Korn shells.

Posix.3     Provides detailed testing and verification requirements for the
Posix family.

Posix.4     Is a set of real-time extensions for real-world problems.

Posix.5     Is a set of Ada language bindings for Posix.1 services.

Posix.6     Is a set of security enhancements to the basic system.

Posix.7     Provides standard system administration facilities.

Posix.8     Is a set comprising four subgroups specifying standard network
interfaces.

Posix.9     Is a set of FORTRAN language bindings for Posix.1 services.

Posix.10    Is a supercomputing Application Environment Profile (AEP)
specifying the requirements that supercomputer users (i.e. vector
and/or parallel architecture machines) of the other Posix
standard, typically Posix.4 and Posix.8.

Posix.11    Is the transaction processing AEP specification.

As you might guess, there's a lot of overlap between the Posix standard
functions and ANSI/ISO standard C. In addition, Posix also contains most of
the low-level functions ANSI left out such as open(), close(), read(),
write(), etc. as well as things ANSI/ISO C doesn't begin to address. The
opendir(), closedir(), readdir(), telldir(), seekdir() and rewinddir()
functions in SNIPPETS conform the Posix standard for these functions, as does
their associated header, dirent.h.