Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 17 Apr 1997 00:58:43 +0200 (MET DST) | From | Baldur Norddahl <> | Subject | Re: procfs problems |
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On 16 Apr 1997, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> I know people love their good old text, ASCII if possible, so you can be sure > it's only readable conveniently by humans who can understand english. > > Why in the world is 'cat /proc/cpuinfo' better than 'bin2text /proc/cpuinfo' ? > All that text-printing stuff has nothing to do in the kernel anyway.
It is a lot easier to write a script or small program that reads the proc files if they are in ascii format, since you need no documentation to do so. Just cat the file and you have almost all information you need.
I could spawn the 'bin2text' program but then perfomance is going to suck. If I don't want to spawn bin2text I need to store translation tables inside my program, and thereby incresse the changes that my program wont work with a future kernel. By using the ascii version I could ignore new tags, and my program would produce sensible output even thou it hadn't ever heard of a cyrix cpu before. It could simply print the tag value instead of resulting to printing "unknown" becouse it have an outdated translation table.
Baldur
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