“Everything is a file” is what made me start understanding linux few years ago and from there it got easier to use with each new concept.
Still this was really revolutionary to me when I first heard it. Made a bunch of things just click.
“Everything is a file” is what made me start understanding linux few years ago and from there it got easier to use with each new concept.
Still this was really revolutionary to me when I first heard it. Made a bunch of things just click.
I am curious what you mean by everything is a file… What else would it be?
It’s more a philosophy for Unix systems. When we say that “everything is a file”, we’re saying that even devices should show up on the filesystem (/dev), even network ports should show up on the filesystem, even processes should show up on the filesystem(/proc), etc… and that is as opposed to having a different system abstraction handle those functions instead.
Of course when you look deeper into it, linux does not explicitly follow that rule, it more just adheres to it. It’s more a guideline than an explicit statement of fact
It could be a process, which you can talk to only via an IPC call. For example, dbus
Yeah I’m interested in how that works too.
I’ve recently been looking at the Nextcloud “all in one” Docker image. It works by mounting the docker.sock file into the master container, which allows that container to stand up a whole bunch of other containers on your machine.
How would that work on Windows, if the Docker socket isn’t a file handle?
Docker Desktop handles the abstraction in Windows and MacOS. The container thinks it mounted a file.
Oh that’s interesting. I wonder why they do it that way, considering macOS is a Unix OS.