Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sat, 24 Oct 1998 11:09:07 -0700 (PDT) | From | Tim Smith <> | Subject | Re: ARMS WAVING!!! Proposal to fix /proc dainbrammage. |
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On Sat, 24 Oct 1998, Mark H. Wood wrote: >>[Question about having format version information in /proc] ... > (My take on this question is that programs should not be looking in /proc > at all; everything shown there should be available in binary form via > syscall, and if you want to use the data in scripts there should be > userspace programs that use the syscalls and provide script-appropriate > formatting. This way, programs have no column-order or spelling issues to
If the data is available in binary form via a system call, you could also have userspace programs that take that data and format it for humans. The question is, where should formatting take place--in the kernel, or in userspace?
Despite years of using Windows, I can sense my Unix roots crying out "Userspace!!!" :-)
> deal with (on the input side, anyway), and other format changes should be > rare because in most cases the format will be tied to the CPU > architecture. Meanwhile humans get to read stuff that isn't cluttered > with format version numbers or obfuscated to make mechanical parsing easier.)
I don't think most people would find a single line with a version number in a /proc entry to be unduly cluttered, and things don't have to be obfuscated to make mechanical parsing easy, as long as the parser knows the format.
--Tim Smith
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