Subject: Re: /dev/cuaXX & other things
To: Computo Ergo Checksum <>
From: Tobias Weingartner <weingart@austin.BrandonU.CA>
List: current-users
Date: 12/26/1994 18:51:09
>  * 
>  * One thing I do worry about, is the haphazard way that devices are named
>  * in the /dev directory.  Can we clean this up some?  Please?
>  * 
> To those of us who have been born and raised on BSD UNIX from day 1,
> /dev/{device}/{number}/{device-files} is pretty evil-looking.

Yeah, I don't mind /dev/sd0a, or whatever.  However, ever forget what
that darn device happened to be called?  Ever do an 'ls -alF' on /dev,
thinking you could spot it?  Even 'ls -alF | grep ... | more' is tedious
at best.  On a "personal" system, this method might get you someplace,
but on any decent server (DB server, with 15+ disks, 200+ pty's), this
gets *very* ugly *very* quickly.

The thing I was trying to get at, was "we have a *tree* structured file-
system, let's use it" type of approach.  Why does everything have to be
lumped into /dev?  A quick 'ls /dev | wc -l' tells me 284 files!  And this
is on a stock NetBSD-1.0 system... ;-|

> It's very intuitive once you read up on the basics (and if one can't
> be bothered to read up on basics, one can go use NT or something).

I never said it was not intuitive, just haphazard.  No inherit structure,
appart from convention.  A convention wich works, but get *big* quickly.

> BSD != SVR4.

Never said it was.  I said take the idea, and change it, make it better.

> I thought there was one master pty per slave?

Ok, then how 'bout:


> NetBSD is pretty friendly, from my point of view.  BSD always has been.

Yeah, for *me* BSD is friendly too.  I have enough sys-admin and programing
experience on BSD systems to feel right at home.  However, do you wanna
explain to some of my clients why /dev/sd0a is the root partition?   Or,
can you explain how to open a pty (master and slave), without using any
library routine except open, close, and ioctl (fcntl)?

> Does anyone else out there /despise/always/typing/long/filenames/for/devices?
> /dev/ttyp0 is fine for me...

Hmm, /dev/tty/0 is not any longer, and it makes things nicer IMHO.

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