getcwd() and friends.

[Scott Schwartz]

In article <824 at necisa.necisa.oz>, boyd at necisa (Boyd Roberts) writes:
>What we really need is /dev/time.  Opening it returns a descriptor refering
>to the system time inode.  You can fstat() it and determine the current
>time from the modification time.  Its modification time would be updated
>by clock().

More logical to read it to get the time, don't you think?

>This would move us ever closer to a true descriptor based OS...

I think we need a good dose of Multics: Reading the time should be
equivalent to accessing an object in virtual memory.  In fact, the
whole operating system system should behave like that, filesystem,
system calls, and so on.

Recently there was a discussion about the SysV shm* namespace vs the
file descriptor namespace.  The answer to the question "is this a good
thing" is no.  A real OS (taking no prisoners, here :-) needs only
virtual memory.  Everything else should be part of that.  Shared
memory should be part of the filesystem because the filesystem and
memory are identical.  In that case it is unnatural to have a separate
access mechanism like the shm* stuff.
-- 
Scott Schwartz		<schwartz at shire.cs.psu.edu>