=head1 NAME Devel::CheckOS::Families - what OS "families" are supported "out of the box" by Devel::CheckOS and Devel::AssertOS? =head1 WHAT IS AN OS FAMILY Computing platforms fall into several categories. For example, there is the category of Unix-a-likes. Each of these categories is a "family". A platform can fall into several families. =head1 THE Unix FAMILY Broadly speaking, these are platforms where: =over =item Devices are represented as pseudo-files in the filesystem =item Symlinks and hardlinks are supported in at least some filesystems =item "Unix-style" permissions are supported That is, there are seperate read/write/execute permissions for file owner, group and anyone. This implies the presence of multiple user accounts and user groups. Permissions may not be supported on all filesystems. =item The filesystem has a single root =item The C API for the operating system is largely POSIX-compatible =back =head1 THE MicrosoftWindows FAMILY This includes any version of Windows and also includes things like Cygwin which run on top of it. =head1 THE DEC, Sun, and Apple FAMILIES These include any OS written by, respectively, DEC, Sun, and Apple. They exist because, while, eg, Mac OS Classic and Mac OS X are very different platforms, they do support some unique features - such as AppleScript. =head1 THE Realtime FAMILY This is for all real-time OSes. So far, it only includes QNX. =head1 THE EBCDIC FAMILY OSes which use EBCDIC instead of ASCII. =head1 AUTHOR, COPYRIGHT and LICENCE Copyright 2008 - 2010 David Cantrell EFE This documentation is free-as-in-speech. It may be used, distributed and modified under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License, whose text you may read at L. =head1 CONSPIRACY This documentation is also free-as-in-mason. =cut