Is Unix getting bloated with un-needed special cases?

[Spannring]

A few years back I purchased a book called "Programming in the 
Unix Environment" by Kernighan and Pike.  After reading this book
I was impressed how everything in Unix is just a file.  In fact, they 
showed how even a directory is just another file.  There was an example
using the od command to look at the actual contents of the current
working directory.  Then they wrote some nifty C functions to take 
an incorrectly spelled file name and make a guess as to what the user 
really meant.  

Times have changed.  I tried using od to look at my current directory 
on an Ultrix box.  No dice.  So I wrote a little program using only 
low-level system calls.  No dice.  f = open(".", ORDONLY) worked 
fine, but read(f, buf, 1) failed with errno equal to 21 (EISDIR).

It seems to me that Unix used to be a nice little OS without
special cases.  Not any more.  Since handling special cases 
will slow the system down, why do it?  Comments?  Explanations?

--
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 Six of one, 110 (base 2) of       | Craig Spannring
 another.                          | icsu7039 at caesar.cs.montana.edu
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