An idea probably discarded many times

[Rob McMahon]

In article <3508 at zorba.Tynan.COM> uunet!convex.COM!tchrist (Tom Christiansen) writes:
>In article <3495 at zorba.Tynan.COM> larry at macom1.UUCP (Larry Taborek) writes:
>>Processes in Unix are alot like files though, they have user and
>>group permissions just like files.
>
>untrue.  process groups are more analogous to directory sub-trees than
>to group id's.

I'm not completely convinced by this, processes have a very obvious parent/
child/sibling relationship, and presumably Larry was talking about the
effective (or real ?) group id of the process, rather than it's process group.

It does bring up an interesting point about /proc, though: what does the
directory structure look like ?  It would seem to be logical and useful to
have it organised as a tree, with childless processes appearing as files, and
those with children appearing as directories, with their children as entries.
It might require you to be able to open a `directory' for writing, is this a
per-filesystem attribute, or would this cause any problems ?

Rob

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Rob McMahon, Computing Services, Warwick University, Coventry CV4 7AL, England