Introduction

Phil is a portability library for flavors of Unix. It includes a C library, some programs & code for portable shell programming, some tips for portable makefiles, & this documentation, which describes installing Phil, writing programs to make use of Phil, & general portability tips.

Audience

Appropriate readers include

• software developers who want their programs to be portable (whether or not they intend to use the Phil library),

• people who've just learned that a software package they want to install requires Phil, & they want to know what Phil is about & where it's been before they install it on their systems,

• anyone else who is interested in portable software.

Assumptions

I assume the reader agrees that portability is a valuable feature in software, at least among flavors of Unix. If the reader doesn't see any value in portable software, Phil is probably not of any interest to that reader. I do not attempt to convince the reader of the importance of portability.

This Document

This document is written in L^ATEX.