1.8 A word about Unix standards ``The wonderful thing about Unix standards is that there are so many to choose from.'' You may be totally bewildered about t

1.8 A word about Unix standards ``The wonderful thing about Unix standards is that there are so many to choose from.'' You may be totally bewildered about the multitude of various standards that exist. Rest assured that nowhere in this manual will you encounter an attempt to spell it all out for you; you could not read and internalise such a twisted account without bleeding from the nose and ears. However, you might keep in mind the following simple fact: of all the standards, POSIX is the least common denominator. So when this manual repeatedly refers to POSIX, the point is ``the thing we are describing should be portable just about anywhere.'' Scsh sticks to POSIX when at all possible; its major departure is symbolic links, which aren't in POSIX (see -- it really is a least common denominator). I often get nostalgic for the old days, but it could be pretty terrible.