Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Sun, 29 Sep 96 15:02 PDT | From | Daniel Quinlan <> | Subject | Re: proposal for generic interface to /proc text files |
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Daniel Quinlan <quinlan@pathname.com> wrote:
>> [in subfields] >> I'd like to recommend lowercase letters (in the Unix tradition), >> but don't feel it would be smart to prohibit uppercase letters.
Albert Cahalan <albert@ccs.neu.edu> writes:
> We can't put filenames in /proc then, unless we also prohibit all > those characters in ext2 and NFS - oh, NFS is not our standard...
The recommendation would only be for those fields where the text is 100% programmer-defined. Data values like environment variables, filenames, and vendor-defined strings (as in /proc/cpuinfo and /proc/scsi/scsi) are obviously excluded.
Also, while filenames are the best example of lowercase identifiers being traditional in Unix, they are not the only one.
The reason I made the suggestion was to encourage more uniform strings in subfields. For example, "vendor_id" in /proc/cpuinfo and "disk_rio" in /proc/stat rather than mixed use ("VendorId" and "disk_rio").
> That is also to slow for some things. I suggest that _most_ files in > /proc should be padded to 2^n bytes. For example, 31 characters plus > a newline or 127 characters plus a null. Then the block size will be > an exact multiple of the line size, so the code is simple and fast.
Presumably, the files in /proc that are in text format have lower speed requirements. However, it may be worthwhile to add trailing whitespace for improved speed where it is needed.
Dan
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