On Wed, 7 Mar 2018 10:05:41 +0100 Peter Suetterlin <pit@astro.su.se> wrote:
James Knott wrote:
I thought everything on *nix was supposed to be a file.
Yes, my thought, too.
It's a good line but it's an oversimplification. As https://lwn.net/Articles/411845/ says, it would be better to say « However that term does the idea an injustice as it overstates the reality. Clearly everything is not a file. Some things are devices and some things are pipes and while they may share some characteristics with files, they certainly are not files. A more accurate, though less catchy, characterization would be "everything can have a file descriptor". It is the file descriptor as a unifying concept that is key to this design. It is the file descriptor that makes files, devices, and inter-process I/O compatible. » Plan 9 took the "everything is a file" idea much further, but sadly, it did not catch on. -- Liam Proven - Technical Writer, SUSE Linux s.r.o. Corso II, Křižíkova 148/34, 186-00 Praha 8 - Karlín, Czechia Email: lproven@suse.com - Office telephone: +420 284 241 084 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org