On Sunday 08 January 2006 03:00, Randall R Schulz wrote:
I said it behaved like one, I didn't say it was one. And it does behave like one
I disagree. It doesn't behave like anything at all, since it does not exist at all. Not the way any real file system does, with disk blocks, inodes and a directory tree. The /proc pseudo-file system is just a stylized way of presenting kernel data structures.
You really have a problem with the whole concept of "behaves like", don't you
That pseudo-entry in that pseudo-file system is not the internal inode table and it is the reference count in the inode table reaching zero that initiates reclamation of the file's disk resources. Even if that /proc/pid/fd entries did not exist (and they don't), it is the fact that a process has an open file table entry pointing to the inode table entry that prevents inodes with no referring directory entries from being reclaimed.
Again, the entries in /proc are just a way of presenting the information from kernel data structures in a manner easily visible to user-level code. They are not primary entities the way actual directory entries are.
You're telling me this as if I didn't know it. It *behaves like* a hardlink, regardless of what it actually is. It's know as an abstraction. By way of a simile, I could point out that nothing in the linux virtual file system requires a file system to have inodes, but it does require it to *behave as if* it does. In any case, it's still not "just a symlink", which was what you originally said