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authorJim Meyering <jim@meyering.net>2003-11-05 03:34:09 +0000
committerJim Meyering <jim@meyering.net>2003-11-05 03:34:09 +0000
commit875086bc91d38376115a5fec90e648fd85946563 (patch)
treeaa0a723561e0b4a1489094f6bd6ebf89540a25f3 /README
parentd324de53cb6e3316701cdd8ea464bcc54c801874 (diff)
downloadcoreutils-875086bc91d38376115a5fec90e648fd85946563.tar.xz
Document _POSIX2_VERSION.
Diffstat (limited to 'README')
-rw-r--r--README9
1 files changed, 7 insertions, 2 deletions
diff --git a/README b/README
index 7dc7b1830..3ce276057 100644
--- a/README
+++ b/README
@@ -19,8 +19,13 @@ See the file NEWS for a list of major changes in the current release.
See the file INSTALL for compilation and installation instructions.
-These programs are intended to be POSIX.2 compliant (with BSD and other
-extensions), like the rest of the GNU system.
+These programs are intended to conform to POSIX (with BSD and other
+extensions), like the rest of the GNU system. By default they conform
+to older POSIX (1003.2-1992), and therefore support obsolete usages
+like "head -10" and "chown owner.group file". This default is
+overridden at build-time by the value of <unistd.h>'s _POSIX2_VERSION
+macro, and this in turn can be overridden at runtime as described in
+the documentation under "Standards conformance".
The ls, dir, and vdir commands are all separate executables instead of
one program that checks argv[0] because people often rename these