Why does typing POSIX into search engine give a lot of links to websites answering "What is POSIX?" instead of the actual POSIX specification? Blergh

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@vaporeon_ (you can only reliably depend on things from POSIX-2001 / Issue 6 and earlier on most operating systems tho; nobody claims POSIX-2024 / Issue 8 or even 2017 / Issue 7 compatibility. but some aspects do still have broad support)

@Lady Thanks! How do I find the earlier versions? I tried going to pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs, but all the directories are just bunch of numbers and there's a lot of them, I don't know which of them has the earlier versions...

@vaporeon_ the bottom of the main introductory page links to previous versions going back to 2008, which is the first version of Issue 7 (it was revised and republished multiple times via application of “technical corrigenda”; i won’t pretend to understand their process)

the 2004 edition of issue 6 appears to be here: <pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/>; not sure if the original 2001 edition is still up/usable

however i usually just use the latest version (2024), and check the change history at the bottom of the page for a given feature to see if it was added recently or not. if i'm depending on functionality introduced after Issue 6, i make a note of it so people can confirm they have a compatible implementation

@vaporeon_ for quickly finding it, searching “open group base issue 8” is the magic phrase, at least in duckduckgo

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