Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Sun, 4 Nov 2001 18:41:59 +0100 | From | Jakob Østergaard <> | Subject | Re: PROPOSAL: dot-proc interface [was: /proc stuff] |
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On Sun, Nov 04, 2001 at 06:28:47PM +0100, Daniel Phillips wrote: > On November 4, 2001 05:45 pm, Tim Jansen wrote: > > > The dot-proc file is basically a binary encoding of Lisp (or XML), e.g. it > > > is a list of elements, wherein an element can itself be a list (or a > > > > Why would anybody want a binary encoding? > > Because they have a computer?
Yes - good reason :)
The "fuzzy parsing" userland has to do today to get useful information out of many proc files today is not nice at all. It eats CPU, it's error-prone, and all in all it's just "wrong".
However - having a human-readable /proc that you can use directly with cat, echo, your scripts, simple programs using read(), etc. is absolutely a *very* cool feature that I don't want to let go. It is just too damn practical.
But building a piece of software that needs to reliably read out status information from a system providing something more and more resembling a GUI in text-files is becoming unnecessarily time-consuming and error-prone.
> > > It needs special parsers and will be almost impossible to access from shell > > scripts. > > No, look, he's proposing to put the binary encoding in hidden .files. The > good old /proc files will continue to appear and operate as they do now. >
Exactly.
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