7 Feb
2018
7 Feb
'18
2:38 a.m.
From: Greg Lehey
> V3 and earlier still *called* them special files,
but it seems they
> were essentially just magic inode numbers (there was no physical file
> on disk, just any directory entry with the given inode would be the
> special file).
Isn't that still the case?
From reading the manual page (URL sent earlier), in V3
and before it really
was just an inode _number_ (less than 50, IIRC). The first
inode, in the
first disk block after the super-block, was inode #51. This is of course
different from later Versions, where there is an _inode_ for devices, but
still no actual _file_.
Noel