The Open Group Base Specifications Issue 6
IEEE Std 1003.1, 2004 Edition
Copyright © 2001-2004 The IEEE and The Open Group

This standard has been jointly developed by the IEEE and The Open Group. It is simultaneously an IEEE Standard, an ISO/IEC Standard, and an Open Group Technical Standard.

The Austin Group

This standard was developed, and is maintained, by a joint working group of members of the IEEE Portable Applications Standards Committee, members of The Open Group, and members of ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1. This joint working group is known as the Austin Group.1 The Austin Group arose out of discussions amongst the parties which started in early 1998, leading to an initial meeting and formation of the group in September 1998. The purpose of the Austin Group has been to revise, combine, and update the following standards: ISO/IEC 9945-1, ISO/IEC 9945-2, IEEE Std 1003.1, IEEE Std 1003.2, and the Base Specifications of The Open Group Single UNIX Specification.

After two initial meetings, an agreement was signed in July 1999 between The Open Group and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Inc., to formalize the project with the first draft of the revised specifications being made available at the same time. Under this agreement, The Open Group and IEEE agreed to share joint copyright of the resulting work. The Open Group has provided the chair and secretariat for the Austin Group.

The base document for the revision was The Open Group's Base volumes of its Single UNIX Specification, Version 2. These were selected since they were a superset of the existing POSIX.1 and POSIX.2 specifications and had some organizational aspects that would benefit the audience for the new revision.

The approach to specification development has been one of ``write once, adopt everywhere'', with the deliverables being a set of specifications that carry the IEEE POSIX designation, The Open Group's Technical Standard designation, and an ISO/IEC designation. This set of specifications forms the core of the Single UNIX Specification, Version 3.

This unique development has combined both the industry-led efforts and the formal standardization activities into a single initiative, and included a wide spectrum of participants. The Austin Group continues as the maintenance body for this document.

Anyone wishing to participate in the Austin Group should contact the chair with their request. There are no fees for participation or membership. You may participate as an observer or as a contributor. You do not have to attend face-to-face meetings to participate; electronic participation is most welcome. For more information on the Austin Group and how to participate, see http://www.opengroup.org/austin.

Background

The developers of this standard represent a cross section of hardware manufacturers, vendors of operating systems and other software development tools, software designers, consultants, academics, authors, applications programmers, and others.

Conceptually, this standard describes a set of fundamental services needed for the efficient construction of application programs. Access to these services has been provided by defining an interface, using the C programming language, a command interpreter, and common utility programs that establish standard semantics and syntax. Since this interface enables application writers to write portable applications-it was developed with that goal in mind-it has been designated POSIX,2 an acronym for Portable Operating System Interface.

Although originated to refer to the original IEEE Std 1003.1-1988, the name POSIX more correctly refers to a family of related standards: IEEE Std 1003.n and the parts of ISO/IEC 9945. In earlier editions of the IEEE standard, the term POSIX was used as a synonym for IEEE Std 1003.1-1988. A preferred term, POSIX.1, emerged. This maintained the advantages of readability of the symbol ``POSIX'' without being ambiguous with the POSIX family of standards.

Audience

The intended audience for this standard is all persons concerned with an industry-wide standard operating system based on the UNIX system. This includes at least four groups of people:

  1. Persons buying hardware and software systems

  2. Persons managing companies that are deciding on future corporate computing directions

  3. Persons implementing operating systems, and especially

  4. Persons developing applications where portability is an objective

Purpose

Several principles guided the development of this standard:


Footnotes

1.
The Austin Group is named after the location of the inaugural meeting held at the IBM facility in Austin, Texas in September 1998.
2.
The name POSIX was suggested by Richard Stallman. It is expected to be pronounced pahz-icks, as in positive, not poh-six, or other variations. The pronunciation has been published in an attempt to promulgate a standardized way of referring to a standard operating system interface.

 

 


UNIX ® is a registered Trademark of The Open Group.
POSIX ® is a registered Trademark of The IEEE.
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