7 Feb
2018
7 Feb
'18
1:48 a.m.
On Tue, Feb 6, 2018, at 10:56, ron minnich wrote:
these were in by the time I can along but I was
wondering when they got it.
They've also always felt a bit like a thing that did not fit to me. I'm
pretty sure I was not alone, given that the Unix authors worked out a way
to get rid of them in later efforts. I know what came after, in Plan 9;
what came before, in Unix, that led to special files?
V3 and earlier still *called* them special files, but it seems they were essentially just
magic inode numbers (there was no physical file on disk, just any directory entry with the
given inode would be the special file).
http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V3/man/man5/fs.5