     This file is a part of the fortranposix library. This makes system calls on Linux and Unix like systems available to Fortran programs.
     Copyright (C) 2004  Madhusudan Singh 

    This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
    modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public
    License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either
    version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

    This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
    but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
    MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
    Lesser General Public License for more details.

    You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public
    License along with this library; if not, write to the Free Software
    Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307  USA

    I would strongly welcome bug reports, feature enhancement requests, compliments, donations and job offers :) My email address : msc@ieee.org

fortranposix overview :

This project started as a part of gnuplotfortran which provides the ability to access GNUPlot directly from Fortran 90/95. I found myself writing so many wrapper routines in C that I decided that a separate library with provides POSIX system calls to FORTRAN programmers was worth it. I know that Intel has its free but non-GPL'ed POSIX library. Sun has its own, and other vendors probably have their Fortran POSIX libraries. This, IMO, leads to many problems :

1. Platform dependent implementation. This creates difficulties in moving Fortran code from compiler to compiler and one Unix variant to another.
2. Since it is not GPL'ed (or LGPL'ed), it limits free use by users.

I believe that this project solves 2 as it uses underlying GNU C library calls, and is LGPL'ed. However, progress on 1 will depend upon how well supported is Fortran 90/95 - C inter-op. Currently, this project provides the library - libfortranposix.so which contains calls to C routines written with underscores. However, some compilers might have issues in attaching underscores (or attaching two of them). This is where you come in - please help me test this with different compilers and on different OS's. The more bug reports and feature requests that you send, the better this library will become.

The first, alpha release of this library depends explicitly upon a Linux OS (see the file posixwrapper.c to understand why).

(Update - version 0.1 has been tested on Sun with Sun f95 and gcc)

Files supplied in this package :

1. This file, README.
2. LICENSE, which contains the exact terms of the LGPL license, obtainable from http://www.fsf.org
3. INSTALL : instructions for compiling, and installing this library
4. Makefile
5. fortranposix.f90
6. posixwrapper.c
7. fortranposix_interfaces.f90
8. CREDITS
9. TODO
10. CHANGES