no gnu [LWN.net]

no gnu

Posted Aug 21, 2009 7:29 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: no gnu by ncm
Parent article: 40 years of Unix (BBC)

If you can read past the ALL CAPS, RFC681 describes the rather peculiar
open()/close()-in-userpace /dev/net/$hostname scheme they used back then.

A shame it's not still in use.

links < /dev/net/com/google/www

to post comments

no gnu

Posted Aug 21, 2009 9:29 UTC (Fri) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link] (2 responses)

echo "GET /search?q=/dev/tcp+ksh HTTP/1.1" > /dev/tcp/www.google.com/80

:-D

no gnu

Posted Aug 21, 2009 10:07 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

GNU awk can do this too. But it's not really in the filesystem, so it's cheating.

Of course, with FUSE and asynchronous name lookup, we can do this properly, without relying on a horrible userspace-NFS-server hack. (ls(1) would necessarily only be able to show you names you'd already looked up, though.)

Plan 9?

Posted Aug 27, 2009 8:00 UTC (Thu) by job (guest, #670) [Link]

Doesn't Plan 9 have a similar TCP-by-filesystem thing going on?