[TUHS] Etymology of the open file table?

[Dan Cross]

On Mon, Mar 21, 2016 at 10:28 PM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:

> So if you think about it you need two levels, the fd that is per open
> that knows the offset, and the fd to the object in question.  The file
> table is the latter.
>

Sure, but why does the second thing necessarily have to be a table? Does it?

        - Dan C.

On Mon, Mar 21, 2016 at 08:23:43PM -0600, Marc Rochkind wrote:
> > A ref-counted data structure organized how, for what language? Integers
> are
> > really easy to work with.
> >
> > (Perhaps I misunderstood your post.)
> >
> > On Mon, Mar 21, 2016 at 8:07 PM, Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > This came up today at work; what's the origin of the open file table?
> The
> > > suggestion was made that, instead, a ref-counted data structure could
> be
> > > allocated at open() time to serve the same purpose, and that a table of
> > > open files was superfluous. My guess was that this made it (relatively)
> > > easy to look up what files referred to a particular device?
> > >
>
> --
> ---
> Larry McVoy                  lm at mcvoy.com
> http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
>
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