POSIX is a family of standards, specified by the IEEE, to clarify and make uniform the application programming interfaces (and ancillary issues, such as commandline shell utilities) provided by Unix-y operating systems. When you write your programs to rely on POSIX standards, you can be pretty sure to be able to port them easily among a large family of Unix derivatives (including Linux, but not limited to it!); if and when you use some Linux API that's not standardized as part of Posix, you will have a harder time if and when you want to port that program or library to other Unix-y systems (e.g., MacOSX) in the future.
与恶龙缠斗过久,自身亦成为恶龙；凝视深渊过久,深渊将回以凝视…
