An idea probably discarded many times

[Roger Gonzalez]

Since one of Unix's claims to fame is the fact that "everything is a file",
why aren't processes treated the same way?  I think it would be a nice
addition to Unix to have a virtual '/proc' directory mounted in the file
system.  Doing a 'ls -l' might reveal something like:

total 5
prwxrwx---  1 rg            581 Sep 18 13:36 a.out*
prwxrw-rw-  1 daemon       4736 Sep  5 16:56 huntd*
prwx------  1 root         2293 Sep 18 13:37 who*
etc.

And instead of the typical message passing scheme(s), pipes, and what-not,
all processes have "buffer areas" which they can use or choose to ignore,
and you can open a process just as if it were a file.  I have worked on
a similar idea (although on a real-time multi-cpu OS where we don't have a
file system at all) where all process<->process and process<->device I/O looks
for all the world like your standard open, close, read, write, and ioctl
calls.  We did this mainly to simplify porting standard code to our wierd
environment.  The system works well enough for us that I was curious why 
Unix wasn't implemented with processes in the file system as well.

-Roger

-------------------------
Roger Gonzalez
Marine Systems Engineering Laboratory
University of New Hampshire

unhd!rg at cs.utexas.edu
r_gonzalez at unhh.bitnet