24 Mar
2017
24 Mar
'17
9:06 a.m.
On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 3:37 AM, Kurt H Maier <khm(a)sciops.net> wrote:
On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 07:15:13AM +0000, shawn wilson
wrote:
I actually have strong opinions about this (read: disagreements). Your
shell shouldn't know about connect() - I guess allowing writing to
/dev/eth0 would work for me. But in bash, IIRC that damn ghost file
thing is like half of the files in source and it helps nothing. Maybe
if the point was to allow some remote shell (like X does) I could see
it (but than I'd scream about the security implications about
something like that). And I'll say again - why? You want a socket -
nc, ncat, socat - pick one - don't abuse your shell.
Everything is still a file.
Except for your network, of course -- that might have a file interface
available... provided by your shell. Because of course /dev/tcp should
be a shell feature. Why would anyone put that in the kernel?
Linux (and the wider later-unixlike world) is full of
these bizarre
little
quirks -- due to the earlier-mentioned practicality. At first it was
people scratching their own itches, then it switched over to people
scratching corporate itches.
I've got mixed feelings about this - while I like being able to
install a Fedora or Debian on a box and it generally just work (except
for things like raid controllers, IPMI, and the like) and remember the
days of Slackware where it took a week just to get to a point where
you were ~happy with an install. I do kinda see how this went a bit
sideways and wish someone had put some thought into where things went
(memory/calls and files).
Linux has around 400 system calls, and still supports
just about ever
(userspace-exposed) syscall it has ever had. This is why it needs a
thousand little binary shims to get stuff done, and the push for systemd
was the pendulum swinging back the other direction. Since
open/read/write/close isn't enough, we'll build a layer to handle all
the weirdness, and now all you need is dbus...
No one wants to see their pet project die :)
No one cares when it's userspace, but it adds up in kernel space.