Followup to: <20011207135100.A17683@codepoet.org>
By author: Erik Andersen <andersen@codepoet.org>
In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel
>
> Right. Tons of apps have illicit insider knowledge of kernel
> major/minor representation and NEED IT to do their job. Try
> running 'ls -l' on a device node. Wow, it prints out major and
> minor number. You can pack up a tarball containing all of /dev
> so tar has to has insider major/minor knowledge too -- as does
> the structure of every existant tarball! Check out, for example,
> Section 10.1.1 (page 210) of the IEEE Std. 1003.1b-1993 (POSIX)
> and you will see every tarball in existance stores 8 chars for
> the major, and 8 chars for the minor....
>
Actually, it's not "tons of apps", it's in the C library itself.
These things are defined in <sys/sysmacros.h> and anyone who uses
anything else should be taken out and shot.
-hpa
-- <hpa@transmeta.com> at work, <hpa@zytor.com> in private! "Unix gives you enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot." http://www.zytor.com/~hpa/puzzle.txt <amsp@zytor.com> - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Dec 07 2001 - 21:00:40 EST