begin quoting Darren New as of Thu, Jun 14, 2007 at 09:34:48AM -0700: > Ralph Shumaker wrote: > >I know little about this topic, very little, but I thought you were the > >one nitpicking (in reverse) when you glossed over his statement that > >pipes are not merely different filesystems. > > No. I'm pointing out that "the arrangement of blocks on a disk" is not > what makes a file system. Why is the pipe system not a file system? How > about FIFOs? How about unix-domain sockets? Are those file systems, or > parts thereof? How about sockets, or Ameoba's file servers, or NFS? What > about Eros, where all files are stored in memory?
Not. Not. Not. Parts. Not. Yes. Yes. Yes. :) > To claim there's a hard and fast cut-off between some of those and > others of those is, I think, erroneous. Certainly you can make a > definition that says "these are file systems, those aren't", but such a > distinction is artificial, and inappropriate to the discussion at hand. Surely, file /systems/ should provide random access to files. Pipes, FIFOs, etc., don't seem to fit that category. They're files, sure, but are they file *systems*? Tape gets fuzzy... tape generally doesn't offer random access to files, but tape *does* offer access to files, and when drives can rewind, you can put a random-access layer on top... which arguably gives one a tape filesystem. Of course, this makes multi-stream files begin to look like a filesystem... -- Multi-stream files should be treated as a special sort of directory. Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
