Tom and Ray and others responded, helping Bill with this.
If the list will indulge me, I'd like to enumerate the seven
most common POSIX files. Might come in handy:
plain files
directories
character special (eg: /dev/ttyS0)
block special (eg: /dev/dasda)
symbolic link
named pipe (or FIFO)
named socket
There are others, usually vendor specific.
For instance, OpenVM and OpenMVS have an "external link"
which looks like any old sym-link, but the flag character at the
start of 'ls -l' is an "E" instead of an "l". Stuff like that.
The first four are the historical Unix files.
The others came along as Unix evolved, branched, and re-joined.
Prefix character of 'ls -l' output is usually "-" for plain files
(I've also seen "F", but I forget where; maybe HP-UX) and "d"
for directories.
Block special and character special are "devices".
Prefix character of 'ls -l' output is "b" and "c" respectively.
Symbolic links are pointers to a file or directory.
What's fun about sym-links is comparing them to hard links.
With sym-links, there is the concept of "the real file"
(the thing they point to). But with hard links, there is
no such animal. Both hard links (assuming there are only two)
are directory entries pointing to the same INODE on disk.
Named pipes are cool! You can have a program open one to read
and it will sit there ... forever ... until another program opens it
for write and plunks something into it. This is probably what happened
in Bill's case. Prefix char is "p" as you noted.
I've never understood named sockets or how they differ
from named pipes. Prefix char is "s".
-- R;
On Tue, 1 May 2007, Bill Dodge wrote:
> I am trying to move some files from one linux(Redhat if it matters) to
> another and both scp and ftp are hanging on a strange file type. I can't
> find any reference to what this file type is but since it has a size of 0 I
> am thinking I can just ignore it.
>
> Does anyone know what this might be?
> |
> V
> prw-r--r-- 1 10000 10000 0 Feb 3 23:46 PIPE.dmp
>
> --
> Bill Dodge
> email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Phone: (703)627-2455
>
> "If you don't know where you are going, any road will take you there."
> Lewis Carroll
> "If you don't know where you are, a map won't help" Unknown
>
>
>
>
>
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