[TUHS] Were all of you.. Hippies?

[Josh Good]

On 2017 Mar 24, 07:23, shawn wilson wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 24, 2017, 01:15 Random832 <random832 at fastmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, Mar 23, 2017, at 21:03, ron minnich wrote:
> > > In Unix, resources have names. They are visible in a name space,
> > > organized
> > > into directories. The names can be enumerated by opening and reading a
> > > directory. Information about them can be determined with stat. Their
> > > contents can be read by open and read. They can be changed with open and
> > > write.
> >
> > And if each resource has a directory (possibly organized in a
> > multiple-level hierarchy) containing several files that describe
> > attributes of that resource, what are you to do when you want to print a
> > report listing a summary of some information about those resources, one
> > per line?
> >
> 
> In bash -
> which read -a foo; do echo <(cmd ${foo[0]});
> done #...? :)

Yeah, because "lspci" was not hard enough to type.

Also, in Unix resources have a name when the kernel has a driver to be
able to know about those resources. But "lspci" can list also hardware
for which the kernel knows no driver (not a typical need in "pure UNIX"
running on a PDP-11 or PDP-8, I guess).

"lspci" is akin to "fdisk -l", for when you need to know what is laying
under the running kernel, at a level lower than the kernel abstractions
for the hardware which it knows about (i.e, hardware for which it has
a driver).

Which brings up a question I have: why didn't UNIX implement ethernet
network interfaces as file names in the filesystem? Was that "novelty" a
BDS development straying away from AT&T UNIX?

-- 
Josh Good