Messages in this thread |  | | From | (Elwyn B Davies) | Subject | Machine friendly format for /proc files | Date | Mon, 17 Feb 97 16:34:28 GMT |
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We are in the process of creating an SNMP agent using the UCSD SNMP code (specifically for the AToM MIB). Much of the information to be returned by accesses to this agent comes from various /proc files.
Clearly this is a very clean and convenient solution compared with typical UNIX solutions which involve the agent itself fishing around inside the kernel to retrieve info from (usually undocumented and unsupported) locations in the memory map.
Unfortunately the format of the various /proc files is pretty much ad hoc and primarily intended to be human readable rather than machine readable. It is also essentially unsupported - it is not a specifically documented and maintained interface - so in some ways it is just as bad as fishing around in the kernel directly. The agent has to be aware of the format of each file and provide specific decoding for the format provided by the device driver writer. Accordingly, a minor change to the format can break the agent.
We propose that it would be very convenient if a more machine friendly and standardised format was added to the /proc files. Something like the M****soft Windows initialisation file format is what we would be looking for (surely they didn't get something right ;-) with parameter/value pairs divided into sections plus comment facilities.
The existing human readable output could be retained as comment either up front (less likely to break existing programs) or tacked on the end (easier to read after cat /proc/xxx)..
Any views?
Regards, Elwyn Davies
------------------------------------------------------------------------ Elwyn B Davies MA Senior Consultant Origin UK/TA Cambridge (Technical Automation Cell) Tel: +44 1223 423355 Fax: +44 1223 420724 Email: edavies@origin-at.co.uk
"The Folly is mostly mine" ------------------------------------------------------------------------
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