"Ian Perry" wrote: >I have heard it said that unix works entirely on files. It always baffled >me to hear that, being a hardware engineer, and writing mostly in low level >assemblers. Now I think I understand what what meant, and that all tasks >are created as a 'file' and are acted on accordingly, hence the /dev >directory and the /proc directory. Am I correct in assuming this ?
Yes. All kinds of things are presented as files, even though they aren't really. (Even `tasks': every live process has a directory under /proc which contains `files' with information about the running process.) Originally it was just devices like printers, disks, tapes and memory. With the /proc filesystem, you also have things like lists of interrupts and network parameters. All these things are presented as files, so that you can use routines like open() on them. -- Oliver Elphick [EMAIL PROTECTED] Isle of Wight http://www.lfix.co.uk/oliver PGP key from public servers; key ID 32B8FAA1 -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .