> 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. this is excellent! The only thing you need now is a new name to mark the address of the new block, a mechanism to seek to this address, and an interface to standard I/O such that writes append to the block's end. nkl