> Why is it? I mean, as far as userspace is concerned, they do have a > unique identifier : their name. How would it be problematic that the
No - a name is never a unique identifier in a Unix system. The fundamental object is the file handle. If I want to be able to answer the question "are these two file handles pointing to the same device" I need the major/minor to do so. Even if I know the name I don't know if two opens of the same name produced references to the same object, because another process may have changed it under me. Most code doesn't care. You can happily replace /dev/null with something else (or accidentally make it a file and then a year later wonder why your disk is full). Names are very much second class citizens. An object can have a file handle without a name, or with many names Alan -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
