Talk:List of POSIX commands

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Questions

1. What is the rationale for using IEEE Std 1003.1-2008 as the justification for what to include as a "UNIX command"? I'm not questioning this decision: it's just unclear why, of all of the standards & authorities out there, this was selected. Considering that the only UNIXs still in active use & support are the BSDs & maybe Solaris -- Linux is "UNIX-like" -- the relevance of this standard is debatable. On the other hand, is there any other source one could use to include/exclude commands? (For example, a list of commands included out-of-box with the major BSD & commercial UNIX versions.)

Please see the long arguments about this above. Many people, including me, think that the rationale used here what is a Unix command is broken. Now even more than a decade ago when these arguments started, it is obvious that "Unix" is not the name of any current system, but rather the name of a family tree of historic systems. "Unix commands" should be a list of commands that existed on these historic systems - not commands which some modern standard decided to standardize or that are considered useful today. We could have a separate list of commands standardized by some specific standard - but the "List of Unix commands" should be about the commands available on classic systems actually called "Unix". Nyh (talk) 08:37, 23 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Then the fact that this article is part of wikiproject linux is questionable too... Regards, Comte0 (talk) 09:48, 23 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

2. In the column "Status" there is a code after the words "Obsolete" & "Optional". What does this code signify?

-- llywrch (talk) 17:53, 2 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

q* relevant?

Is the Portable Batch System really relevant? -- Polluks ★ 15:30, 13 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Probably not (the topic gives no indication that it's relevant to this one) TEDickey (talk) 20:02, 13 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Updating to POSIX issue 8?

The table of contents for the section of the new POSIX release on "Shell and Utilities" has just went live:

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/utilities/toc.html

The official POSIX version changed from 2017 (Which has identical commands to 2008) to 2024, which has removed and added commands from the 2008 list

Should this page be updated to match the most recent, and therefore most official version of POSIX? Vector2010Design (talk) 23:33, 20 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Undefined terms

The table takes too much liberty by using undefined terms including: status, option code and category. These terms should be described.

What is status? Seems to either be mandatory or optional + an option code, but what does option code mean? There are a bunch of codes (CD, FR, SSI,...) that mean nothing to the reader. And status does seem like a good title for values mandatory or optional. How about optionality or mandatory/optional?

What is the purpose of category? What defines the category? If defined by the standard then should say that. If it's defined only here in this article then it's WP creating reality and should be removed. Stevebroshar (talk) 13:08, 18 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Leverage annotated link

Many of the commands have an article and many of them has a good short description. We should leverage that instead of duplicating that info in a description column. Commands that don't have an article or a good short desc could use the current content. Like this:

admin – Create and administer SCCS files

alias – Shell command that defines a word that acts like a command

Look at the source for this to see how I leveraged the Annotated link macro. Stevebroshar (talk) 13:19, 18 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]