Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Tue, 18 Feb 1997 05:06:29 -0500 (EST) | From | Greg Alexander <> | Subject | Re: Machine friendly format for /proc files |
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On Mon, 17 Feb 1997, yuri mironoff wrote:
> Why not develop a system call for obtaining process info? The same > goes for IO. Wouldn't it be nice to have a STANDARD api for querrying all > devices that do IO? Imagine all the utilities that could be written to > take advantage of information like this?
I only have one comment about this -- this is how windows does it. One thing I like about /proc and /etc/passwd and /dev/* stuff is that it's frequently very obvious how to use them. With windows, however (or even some ioctls in /dev), it's difficult to know exactly how it's supposed to work until you've tried it. Syscalls in Unix are generally easier to figure out than in Windows (if not just because we unix people aren't ashamed to use a pointer without trying to hide it behind a typedef), and they're well enough documented that they can be used, but I don't want to see an excessive number of syscalls. ioctl's are almost never decently documented (at least not in an easy to find way), and their arguments are frequently confusing. Hrm. that wasn't very clear. :) I just think that if you provided ioctl's and left the text support in there, no question about it, I'd stick with the text in my applications unless a *useful* procps lib were made that would use the ioctl's. In which case, switching would be easy as pie.
Greg Alexander http://www.cia-g.com/~sietch/
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