Announcing POSIX.1-2013 man pages for Linux

The manual pages produced by the Linux man-pages project attempt to document deviations between Linux behavior and the POSIX.1 standard. However, the pages are no substitute for the standard itself.

In 2004, the IEEE and The Open Group decided to grant permission to the  Linux man-pages project to distribute parts of the then-current version of POSIX.1 in manual page format. That decision provided an extremely valuable resource for Linux programmers who wanted to write applications that are portable across UNIX systems. Evidence of that value has been demonstrated by regular requests in the last few years that the project should update its copy of the POSIX manual pages to the latest version provided by The Austin Group (the umbrella group that works on development of the POSIX.1 standard).

We are pleased to announce that, once again, the IEEE and The Open Group have kindly granted the Linux man-pages permission to distribute extracts from the latest version of the POSIX.1 standard:

IEEE Std 1003.1, 2013 Edition, Standard for Information Technology--Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX), The Open Group Base Specifications Issue 7, Copyright (C) 2013 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc and The Open Group.

(For those curious about the "2013" designation, this is POSIX.1-2008 with the 2013 Technical Corrigendum 1 applied.)

Thanks to some excellent scripting work by Felix Janda, the source files supplied by IEEE and The Open Group have been cleanly converted to  "man" format. The result is that portions of the standard are now
made available for easy reference  as (1139!) manual pages. Those pages are divided into three sections:

• Section 0p = POSIX headers (specifications for header files)
• Section 1p = POSIX utilities (i.e., specifications shell commands)
• Section 3p = POSIX functions (specifications for functions)

Tarballs containing the pages can be found at https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/man-pages/man-pages-posix/man-pages-posix-2013-a.tar.gz and https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/man-pages/man-pages-posix/man-pages-posix-2013-a.tar.xz

Finally, please note that all pages carry the following disclaimer:

In the event of any discrepancy between this version and the original IEEE and The Open Group Standard, the original IEEE and The Open Group Standard is the referee document. The original Standard can be obtained online at http://www.unix.org/online.html.

Any typographical or formatting errors that appear in this page are most likely to have been introduced during the conversion of the source files to man page format. To report such errors, see https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/reporting_bugs.html.