The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 4 (of 5)

POSIX API Documentation

Hi,

Does anybody know where there is an HTML version of the POSIX API reference.

Searches on google turn up a number of commercial pages/related documents. But not the reference.

Richard
Monday, February 16, 2004

http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/index.html

That's actually the manual for GNU Libc, but that includes the POSIX interface. It's a fine manual, too. What others should aspire to be.

Clay Dowling
Monday, February 16, 2004

If you are interested in printed matters too, then the late Richard Steven's Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment may be of interest, it exposes most families of libc and UNIX system calls explaining their SYSV/BSD/POSIX specs.

Li-fan Chen
Monday, February 16, 2004

Of course, all of it is owned by SCO, so you'd better make sure to send them some money if you use it.

Darl McBridee
Monday, February 16, 2004

POSIX has been superseded by the Single UNIX Specification (SUS). You can browse online or download versions 2 and 3 of the specification here:

http://www.unix-systems.org/

Free registration required.

rob mayoff
Monday, February 16, 2004

Is this what you're looking for?

http://www.unix-systems.org/version3/online.html

Nate Silva
Monday, February 16, 2004

http://www.opengroup.org/products/publications/catalog/un.htm

Maxime Labelle
Tuesday, February 17, 2004

Any of the *BSDs will have their manual pages online.

The system calls in section 2 and some of the library calls in section 3 of the manual are POSIX. The manual pages in question will explicitly say so.

Of course, for real hands-on, try downloading one of the BSD distributions and installing it. I recommend
http://www.freebsd.org/

David Jones
Tuesday, February 17, 2004