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  <title>POSIX pricing and availability; or: Do you really need the PDF? — Luke Shumaker</title>
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<header><a href="/">Luke Shumaker</a> » <a href=/blog>blog</a> » posix-pricing</header>
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<h1 id="posix-pricing-and-availability-or-do-you-really-need-the-pdf">POSIX pricing and availability; or: Do you really need the PDF?</h1>
<p>The Open Group and IEEE are weird about POSIX pricing. They’re protective of the PDF, making you pay <a href="http://standards.ieee.org/findstds/standard/1003.1-2008.html">hundreds of dollars</a> for the PDF; but will happily post an HTML version for free both <a href="http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/">online</a>, and (with free account creation) download as a <a href="https://www2.opengroup.org/ogsys/catalog/t101">a .zip</a>.</p>
<p>They also offer a special license to the “Linux man-pages” project, allowing them to <a href="https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/man-pages/man-pages-posix/">distribute</a> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>

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