[TUHS] Device special files

Noel Chiappa jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Wed Feb 7 11:38:25 AEST 2018


    > 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




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