On Mon, 26 Feb 2024 09:20:21 -0500 Thor Lancelot Simon <t...@panix.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 25, 2024 at 04:41:37PM +0000, Sad Clouds wrote: > > > > The whole idea of Unix was "everything is a file" and the sooner people > > get rid of magic ioctls the better. > > But everything is *not*, actually, a file, and forcing things that > are not files into file-like shapes is not always the right design > choice. It is not about forcing things into file-like shapes. For example sockets are represented by file descriptors, but also have their own UDP, TCP, SCTP, etc protocol options and API extensions. There is a small set of core system calls which should work uniformly across all objects represented by file descriptors - open, close, read, write, stat, lseek, etc. The fact that you can use most of such system calls with files, pipes, sockets, block devices, character devices, etc. is a pretty good design in my humble opinion. For example System V shared memory API is just horrid, compared to Posix file-like shm_open, shm_close and mmap. Thanks.
