Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Sat, 19 May 2001 18:48:19 +0200 | From | Erik Mouw <> | Subject | Re: [RFD w/info-PATCH] device arguments from lookup, partion code |
| |
On Sat, May 19, 2001 at 03:02:47PM +0100, Alan Cox wrote: > > ioctls are evil, period. At least with these names you can use normal > > scripting and don't need any special tools. Every ioctl means a binary > > that has no business to exist. > > That is not IMHO a rational argument. It isn't my fault that your shell does > not support ioctls usefully. If you used perl as your login shell you would > have no problem there.
Sure, you're right, but Al's point is that you shouldn't need to.
One of the fundamentals of Unix is that "everything is a file" and that you can do everything by reading or writing that file. The devices are the big exception, they need ioctls to control them. With Al's proposal we can get rid of the ioctls and let the devices behave like normal files.
Erik [who remembers a discussion like this years ago on comp.os.linux.kernel with similar conclusion: ioctls are bad, we should get rid of them]
-- J.A.K. (Erik) Mouw, Information and Communication Theory Group, Department of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Information Technology and Systems, Delft University of Technology, PO BOX 5031, 2600 GA Delft, The Netherlands Phone: +31-15-2783635 Fax: +31-15-2781843 Email: J.A.K.Mouw@its.tudelft.nl WWW: http://www-ict.its.tudelft.nl/~erik/ - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
|  |