Poking around Plan 9 and 9P, I was wondering whether it would be a neat hack or some sort of abuse to read and write dynamically served files at different offsets to get different semantics, instead of reading and writing different files (ctl, clone, etc.) to do that.
Given that the system encourages to perceive files as having arbitrary semantics (as opposed to having regular sequential file semantics) it would make sense (to me) to have reads and writes at arbitrary offsets to have arbitrary semantics as well -- that's, after all, what offset (kind of) does on a regular file, too, although in a rather trivial way. ...but my spider-sense is telling me this would probably be either rather pointless, or troublesome, or prohibited. Please set me straight. Nyang
