enable Posix

[James Wilkinson]

Claude Jones wrote:
> Can someone point me to a doc? A new driver I'm trying to install 
> requires Posix enabled; I found one ref to doing with an entry to fstab, 
> but that doesn't seem to be working, There's lots of docs about 
> programming to use Posix, but I'm not finding a simple description of 
> how to enable it.

I know Claude has now solved it, but for future reference...

POSIX is the IEEE's lengthy set of standards for Unix-like operating
systems. They cover a *lot* of ground about how a system should operate.
So, for example, the POSIX approach to threads is known as POSIX
threads. But POSIX, on its own, does not mean "threading".

That means "enabling posix" is rather ambiguous: which part of the POSIX
standards do you want? Linux largely implements them anyway, at least
when POSIX is "sane". [1] It also means that Googling for "POSIX" is not
likely to come up with anything useful.

Incidentally, the name was invented by Richard Stallman.

This link provides background to the beginning of POSIX:
http://csdl.computer.org/comp/proceedings/hicss/2005/2268/07/22680203b.pdf

James.

[1] For example, POSIX specifies that df and du, by default, return disk
usage in 512 byte blocks. The GNU utilities use 1K blocks (since people
think in terms of K), unless the environment variable POSIXLY_CORRECT is
set.
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