Limitations of POSIX Applications on Windows NT

Last reviewed: December 17, 1996
Article ID: Q149902

The information in this article applies to:

Microsoft Win32 Application Programming Interface (API) included with:
```
    - Microsoft Windows NT versions 3.51 and 4.00
```

SUMMARY

This article discusses the limitations of the Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) applications on Windows NT. POSIX is a standard set by ANSI/IEEE to promote source level compatibility that allows applications to run on a wide variety of systems and architectures. The POSIX interface on Windows NT strictly follows the POSIX 1003.1-1990 standards.

MORE INFORMATION

Following are some of the POSIX limitations:

- POSIX applications only launch other POSIX applications. They can

  not launch DOS, OS/2, Win16 or Win32 applications.

- POSIX applications can not call any Win32 APIs. They do not have

  any access to DDE, OLE, memory mapped files, named pipes, windows
  sockets and other Win32 features.

POSIX applications can not implicitly or explicitly load a Win32 DLL.

POSIX applications do not have access to any networking APIs such as pipes or sockets. They are not network aware, but they can access files over the network.

POSIX applications do not have any source level debugger support. You cannot use Windbg or the Microsoft Visual C++ debugger to debug POSIX applications on Windows NT.

For additional information, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

   ARTICLE-ID: Q99361
   TITLE     : Specifying Filenames Under the POSIX Subsystem

REFERENCES

MSDN Development Library, "Understanding Windows NT POSIX Compatibility", by Ray Cort.

Additional reference words: 3.50 3.51 4.00 POSIX
KBCategory: kbprg
KBSubcategory: SubSys

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Last reviewed: December 17, 1996
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