[TUHS] Device special files

Greg 'groggy' Lehey grog at lemis.com
Wed Feb 7 11:25:56 AEST 2018


On Tuesday,  6 February 2018 at 14:48:19 -0500, Random832 wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 6, 2018, at 10:56, ron minnich wrote:
>> these were in by the time I can along but I was wondering when they got it.
>>
>> They've also always felt a bit like a thing that did not fit to me. I'm
>> pretty sure I was not alone, given that the Unix authors worked out a way
>> to get rid of them in later efforts. I know what came after, in Plan 9;
>> what came before, in Unix, that led to special files?
>
> 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?

Greg
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