Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 27 Oct 1998 16:36:00 -0500 (EST) | From | "Mike A. Harris" <> | Subject | Re: Is /proc ASCII or Binary? |
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On Sun, 25 Oct 1998, Riley Williams wrote:
>There's been regular comments over the last few months on the above >topic, with several viewpoints from each side being put forth. >However, one apparently simple means of allowing BOTH to coexist has >just occurred to me, and I'd like to ask what's wrong with it before I >take it any further... > >When a program opens a file for input, one of the flags it can set on >that file is the one indicating whether the file is in RAW or COOKED >mode. Is there any reason why we couldn't make use of this flag with >the /proc files, with RAW mode producing results in BINARY format >ready for direct input to another program, and COOKED mode producing a >human-readable ASCII output?
I don't know what the original design goals were behind /proc, but I must say that I agree. I love the information that proc provides, but I've tried writing some programs to parse some of the stuff and it is a nightmare. IMHO, it should be easy to *CODE* stuff firstly. Thus I would favor a binary interface to /proc myself. Or perhaps a new heirarchy? /binproc? I dunno, but there are enough problems with parsing /proc that something should be done.
It seems every new kernel that comes out, /proc/cpuinfo changes the way it displays and scripts I've written break. Other programs (not major important ones) have broken as well.
-- Mike A. Harris - Computer Consultant - Linux advocate
Linux software galore: http://freshmeat.net
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