From 875086bc91d38376115a5fec90e648fd85946563 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Jim Meyering Date: Wed, 5 Nov 2003 03:34:09 +0000 Subject: Document _POSIX2_VERSION. --- README | 9 +++++++-- 1 file changed, 7 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) (limited to 'README') 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 '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 -- cgit v1.2.3-70-g09d2