What Is POSIX?
The early days of Unix were like the mythical Wild West, with companies innovating and taking the operating system in quite different directions while simultaneously assuring customers that the new operating systems were compatible and just like the other Unixes. The Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) stepped in and, with a tremendous amount of effort from all the major Unix vendors, created a standard version of Unix called POSIX, against which all the commercial and open source Unix implementations are measured. You can't buy a POSIX operating system per se, but the Unix or Linux you run is POSIX compliant.
Yet even POSIX-compliant Unix implementations can vary. One example of this that will be ...
Get Wicked Cool Shell Scripts now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
