> Not that type of "types." I gave an example (which Charles Forsyth found to
> be a bad one) to set the types of "types" apart. I mean "types" as in named
> pipes ("special" files) versus regular files. In my experience which is
> limited to "modern" UNIX clones, i.e. Linux and *BSD, you can distinguish
> between a number of file "types" and decide what to do accordingly. You can
> tell a directory, from a (character or block) device, from a link, from a
> regular file. These same "types" could, and have been, be used to represent
> some details of the underlying resource.
actually, unix since early bsd does have file types. (actually,
they derive from different types of file descriptors). for example,
there's a different and disjoint set of operations for sockets.
there are some files that only respond to ioctls.
so in plan 9, it's possible to know the device providing the file
(try ls -l /dev), but there are no links, there is a pretty strong
namespace (namespace(4)) convention and all files respond to
the same io primatives so what more information do you need?
- erik
