On Sat, Mar 18, 2023 at 04:21:24PM +0000, segaloco via TUHS wrote: The Linux Standard Base has largely been abandoned --- none of the major Linux companies were willing to pay their engineers to spend time working on it. (It was one of those things that really only mattered to people who were selling software to enterprises, and the *reason* why companies spent $$$ paying engineers to work on LSB and going to ISO meetings was so that enterprise softare vendors could more easily ship product that would work equally well on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SuSE Enterprise Linux.) But even when LSB was around (Debian is dropping LSB support in the next release), it was generally not installed by default and was *not* part of the base install. If you installed the LSB package, it would drag in all of the userspace utilities and libraries needed to provide POSIX.1 and POSIX.2 conformance. One of the reasons why users prefer a very small base install is because if they are trying to install on small systems (such as Rasberry PI), or if they are using container systems (e.g., Docker), they want to keep the base system as small as possible. And there are utilities like uuencode and uudecode, which while required by POSIX.2, in reality, the most users for most Linux distributions don't use, so it's not installed by default. If you want it, you can always install the sharutils package. Finally, I'll note that what Posix.2 requires has changed over time. For example uucp used to be required for POSIX.2 compliance. It no longer is required. In addition, POSIX.2 has withdrawn tools like banner and chroot, and they will be withdrawing calendar, col, cpio, pg, spell, sum, and other utilities in the next revisions of the standard. Complaining about what is the default seems to me to rather pointless. And if you are going to insist on complaining aobut it, what about Solaris? The default Solaris install didn't come with cc or fort77 installed, even though they are required by POSIX.2. You had to pay $$$ to get an optional package if you wanted those tools, and Solaris was still considered "Unix" since it was descended from AT&T code, and they didn't need to present their system for POSIX compliance before being able to use the "Unix" trademark. (And if they did, they would presumably just state in their conformance document that you had to pay $$$ for a copy of Sun Studio.) And I can assure you that Sun Microsystems knew about POSIX. They just chose to not include everything required by POSIX.2 in their default install. - Ted