An idea probably discarded many times
Guy Harris
guy at auspex
Thu Jan 4 17:59:13 AEST 1990
>It doesn't have to work this way. Nothing needs to work differently until
>the ``ls /proc'' does a read() from the special /proc directory (is it even
>a directory?).
Yes, it is a directory.
>The read() system call could then switch out to code that
>examines the proc table and feeds appropriate bytes back to the caller.
Actually, in S5R4 at least,
1) "/proc" is a VFS under the S5R4 Virtual File System mechanism
(similar to the SunOS 4.x one, but with assorted
improvements), so the "read" call doesn't know about it, it
just calls the appropriate "read" operator for the "/proc"
VFS, just as it would for the S5 file system or the BSD file
system or NFS or RFS or.... (i.e., you don't have to teach it
specially about "/proc")
2) "ls" would be using the "getdents()" call, not "read()", and
go to the "read directory" VFS operation, not the "read"
operation.
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