This amendment is part of the POSIX series of standards for applications and user interfaces to open systems. It is a supplement to IEEE Std 1003.2-1992, which defines the applications interface to a shell command language and a set of utility programs for complex data manipulation. This supplement defines the user interface to a distributed batch queuing environment and includes application environments..

When the Batch Environment Option is included, the amended standard has additional scope. The list of utilities and features is extended to provide users a common method to submit work for deferred processing. This specification represents an amendment for distributed batch environments. The amendment is intended to support application and user portability and system interoperability in heterogeneous environments. Distributed batch environments include traditional batch processing and other generic queue processes. NOTE: The Batch Environment Option will be developed as a series of amendments. Each amendment will describe a part of the batch queuing environment and the user of program interface to that portion. The parts of the batch queuing environment are batch servers, user utilities, administrator utilities, library interface, and data stream encoding. The first of the Batch Environment Option amendments provides a definition of application environments and a user utility interface, and it creates a framework for an extensible network protocol.