The New Single UNIX Specification Standard

The new Single UNIX Specification Standard, Version 3, a joint effort between IEEE and the Open Group, was finalized and released in December 2001. The new Single UNIX Specification encompasses the POSIX standards and promotes portability for application programmers. It was designed to give software developers a single set of APIs to be supported by every UNIX system. It provides a reliable road map of standards for programmers who need to write multitasking and multithreading applications. In this book we rely on the Single UNIX Specification Standard for our discussions on process creations, process management, the Pthreads library, the new posix_spawn() routines, the POSIX semaphores, and FIFOs. Appendix B in this book contains excerpts from the standard that can be used as a reference to the material that we present.