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authorLuke Shumaker <lukeshu@lukeshu.com>2018-02-09 21:35:05 -0500
committerLuke Shumaker <lukeshu@lukeshu.com>2018-02-09 22:03:07 -0500
commit031ceb664aa37672cfc0835d13f97a99f2451ea4 (patch)
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+POSIX pricing and availability; or: Do you really need the PDF?
+===============================================================
+---
+date: "2018-02-09"
+---
+
+The Open Group and IEEE are weird about POSIX pricing. They're
+protective of the PDF, making you pay [hundreds of
+dollars][POSIX-IEEE] for the PDF; but will happily post an HTML
+version for free both [online][POSIX-WWW], and (with free account
+creation) download as a [a .zip][POSIX-TOG].
+
+They also offer a special license to the "Linux man-pages" project,
+allowing them to [distribute][POSIX-MAN] the man page portions of
+POSIX (most of it is written as a series of man pages) for free; so on
+a GNU/Linux box, you probably have most of POSIX already downloaded in
+manual sections 0p, 1p, and 3p.
+
+Anyway, the only thing you aren't getting with the free HTML version
+is a line number next to every line of text. It's generated from the
+same troff sources. So, in an article or in a discussion, I'm not
+cheating you out of specification details by citing the webpage.
+
+If you're concerned that you're looking at the correct version of the
+webpage or man pages, the current version (as of February 2018) of
+POSIX is "POSIX-2008, 2016 edition."
+
+[POSIX-IEEE]: http://standards.ieee.org/findstds/standard/1003.1-2008.html
+[POSIX-TOG]: https://www2.opengroup.org/ogsys/catalog/t101
+[POSIX-WWW]: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/
+[POSIX-MAN]: https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/man-pages/man-pages-posix/