24 Mar
2017
24 Mar
'17
6:14 a.m.
On Thu, Mar 23, 2017, at 21:03, ron minnich wrote:
In Unix, resources have names. They are visible in a
name space,
organized
into directories. The names can be enumerated by opening and reading a
directory. Information about them can be determined with stat. Their
contents can be read by open and read. They can be changed with open and
write.
And if each resource has a directory (possibly organized in a
multiple-level hierarchy) containing several files that describe
attributes of that resource, what are you to do when you want to print a
report listing a summary of some information about those resources, one
per line? And of course the information in these files is numeric -
surely you don't expect the database of descriptions to be compiled into
the kernel. So the tool has to go and fetch those too.