Advanced Programming in the UNIX® Environment, Third Edition

2. UNIX Standardization and Implementations

2.1. Introduction

Much work has gone into standardizing the UNIX programming environment and the C programming language. Although applications have always been quite portable across different versions of the UNIX operating system, the proliferation of versions and differences during the 1980s led many large users, such as the U.S. government, to call for standardization.

In this chapter we first look at the various standardization efforts that have been under way over the past two and a half decades. We then discuss the effects of these UNIX programming standards on the operating system implementations that are described in this book. An important part of all the standardization efforts is the specification ...