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What is POSIX? I have read the Wikipedia article and I read it every time I encounter the term. The fact is that I never really understood what it is.
Can anyone please explain it to me by explaining "the need for POSIX" too?
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What Is POSIX? POSIX stands for Portable Operating System Interface. It's a family of standards specified by IEEE for maintaining compatibility among operating systems. Therefore, any software that conforms to POSIX standards should be compatible with other operating systems that adhere to the POSIX standards.
POSIX is an IEEE standard that acts as a standard UNIX version. It is a consortium of vendors that helps users easily port applications across different platforms. POSIX is considered a subset of UNIX and is used to cover different Unix-like environments for many other operating systems.
For now, Linux is not POSIX-certified due to high costs, except for the two commercial Linux distributions Inspur K-UX [12] and Huawei EulerOS [6]. Instead, Linux is seen as being mostly POSIX-compliant.
POSIX is shorthand for Portable Operating System Interface. It is an IEEE 1003.1 standard that defines the language interface between application programs (along with command line shells and utility interfaces) and the UNIX operating system.
POSIX is a family of standards, specified by the IEEE, to clarify and make uniform the application programming interfaces (and ancillary issues, such as commandline shell utilities) provided by Unix-y operating systems.
When you write your programs to rely on POSIX standards, you can be pretty sure to be able to port them easily among a large family of Unix derivatives (including Linux, but not limited to it!); if and when you use some Linux API that's not standardized as part of Posix, you will have a harder time if and when you want to port that program or library to other Unix-y systems (e.g., MacOSX) in the future.
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