What’s the big deal with POSIX? Why are ppl constantly discussing what is and isn’t posix compliant?
The short version: it’s a least-common-denominator standard that spans multiple Unix and Unix-like systems, so if you write to it, your software can fairly-trivially run on various systems.
Windows has some level of Microsoft-provided Posix support, which is what the post is alluding to. I am fairly confident that it doesn’t have full Posix compliance. Cygwin, a separate, non-Microsoft, open-source effort, might qualify.
kagis
Okay, apparently it does confirm to a portion of the Posix standard:
The subsystem only implements the POSIX.1 standard – also known as IEEE Std 1003.1-1990 or ISO/IEC 9945-1:1990 – primarily covering the kernel and C library programming interfaces which allowed a program written for other POSIX.1-compliant operating systems to be compiled and run under Windows NT. The Windows NT POSIX subsystem did not provide the interactive user environment parts of POSIX, originally standardized as POSIX.2. That is, Windows NT did not provide a POSIX shell nor any Unix commands out of the box, except for pax. The NT POSIX subsystem also did not provide any of the POSIX extensions that postdated the creation of Windows NT 3.1, such as those for POSIX Threads or POSIX IPC.
The short version: it’s a least-common-denominator standard that spans multiple Unix and Unix-like systems, so if you write to it, your software can fairly-trivially run on various systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX
Windows has some level of Microsoft-provided Posix support, which is what the post is alluding to. I am fairly confident that it doesn’t have full Posix compliance. Cygwin, a separate, non-Microsoft, open-source effort, might qualify.
kagis
Okay, apparently it does confirm to a portion of the Posix standard:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem