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<h3 class="section">1.2 Standards and Portability</h3>

<p><a name="index-standards-2"></a>
This section discusses the various standards and other sources that the
GNU C library is based upon.  These sources include the ISO&nbsp;C<!-- /@w --> and
POSIX standards, and the System V and Berkeley Unix implementations.

   <p>The primary focus of this manual is to tell you how to make effective
use of the GNU library facilities.  But if you are concerned about
making your programs compatible with these standards, or portable to
operating systems other than GNU, this can affect how you use the
library.  This section gives you an overview of these standards, so that
you will know what they are when they are mentioned in other parts of
the manual.

   <p>See <a href="Library-Summary.html#Library-Summary">Library Summary</a>, for an alphabetical list of the functions and
other symbols provided by the library.  This list also states which
standards each function or symbol comes from.

<ul class="menu">
<li><a accesskey="1" href="ISO-C.html#ISO-C">ISO C</a>:                        The international standard for the C
                                 programming language. 
<li><a accesskey="2" href="POSIX.html#POSIX">POSIX</a>:                        The ISO/IEC 9945 (aka IEEE 1003) standards
                                 for operating systems. 
<li><a accesskey="3" href="Berkeley-Unix.html#Berkeley-Unix">Berkeley Unix</a>:                BSD and SunOS. 
<li><a accesskey="4" href="SVID.html#SVID">SVID</a>:                         The System V Interface Description. 
<li><a accesskey="5" href="XPG.html#XPG">XPG</a>:                          The X/Open Portability Guide. 
</ul>

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