everything is a file

Masterminds of Programming: Conversations With the Creators of Major Programming Languages

by Federico Biancuzzi and Shane Warden  · 21 Mar 2009  · 496pp  · 174,084 words

commands, are very popular AWK programs. This style of problem solving epitomized early AWK applications on Unix, and even many Unix applications today. In Unix, “everything is a file.” Do you have a vision of what might be considered the “file” of the Internet? Al: Files are a nice simple abstraction that should be

The Art of UNIX Programming

by Eric S. Raymond  · 22 Sep 2003  · 612pp  · 187,431 words

of unifying ideas or metaphors that shape its APIs and the development style that proceeds from them. The most important of these are probably the “everything is a file” model and the pipe metaphor[20] built on top of it. In general, development style under any given operating system is strongly conditioned by the

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genetically descended from VMS, with which it shares some important characteristics. NT has grown by accretion, and lacks a unifying metaphor corresponding to Unix's “everything is a file” or the MacOS desktop.[33] Because core technologies are not anchored in a small set of persistent central metaphors, they become obsolete every few years

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coexist uneasily with the weak, remnant command-line interface inherited from DOS and VMS. Socket programming has no unifying data object analogous to the Unix everything-is-a-file-handle, so multiprogramming and network applications that are simple in Unix require several more fundamental concepts in NT. NT has file attributes in some of

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permissions mechanism rather than having to invent your own access-control layer with its own bugs. This falls out as a consequence of adopting the “everything is a file” philosophy of Unix rather than trying to fight it. The terminfo directory layout is rather space-inefficient on most Unix file systems. The entries are

Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution

by Glyn Moody  · 14 Jul 2002  · 483pp  · 145,225 words

, “and consists of maybe two or three notions. The first one, which is perhaps the most innovative thing that Thompson ever thought of, is that everything is a file. Second is the notion that when you build something, no matter whether it’s an editor or whether it’s a way of attaching one

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thing to do, thanks to what Peter Salus had called “perhaps the most innovative thing that [Unix’s creator] ever thought of,” which was that everything is a file for Unix and hence for Linux. This means no conceptual difference exists between sending data to a modem or to a disk drive. This slip

Hacking Exposed: Network Security Secrets and Solutions

by Stuart McClure, Joel Scambray and George Kurtz  · 15 Feb 2001  · 260pp  · 40,943 words

: 7 Risk Rating: 8 UNIX’s simplicity and power stem from its use of files—be they binary executables, text-based configuration files, or devices. Everything is a file with associated permissions. If the permissions are weak out of the box, or the system administrator changes them, the security of the system can be