“Everything is a file” is what made me start understanding linux few years ago and from there it got easier to use with each new concept.

Still this was really revolutionary to me when I first heard it. Made a bunch of things just click.

  • Mr.Chewy@lemmy.world
    23·
    5 months ago

    I may be dumb, been on linux too long or a combination of both. But what other way is there, does windows work differently? (regarding that)

    • rtxn@lemmy.worldM
      50·
      5 months ago

      “Everything is a file” means that many of the system’s components are represented as abstractions in the filesystem. It’s simply an API that allows reading from and writing to it by integrating into the hierarchical file structure.

      If you take a look inside /sys, you will find a fuckton of files, but they don’t represent data stored on a mass storage medium. Instead, the directory contains a mounted sysfs filesystem that contains file-like representations of various parts and properties of the system. For example, you can read them like a file by running cat /sys/block/sda/queue/rotational to check if the sda block device is a spinning disk (1) or solid-state storage (0). Or you can write to them like a file by running echo 1 > /sys/block/sda/devices/delete to command sda’s driver to detach the device. Similarly, /proc contains a mounted procfs filesystem that presents information about running processes as file-like entries; /dev contains a mounted devfs that points to various devices; and /tmp and /run contain tmpfs mounts for temporary storage in volatile memory (RAM or swap).

      Windows uses various other APIs (like the Component Object Model and others) to accomplish the same that are not necessarily tied into the filesystem.

        • drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          31·
          5 months ago

          Anyone interested in this concept should take a look at plan9. Everything is even more of a file there.

          Taking a screenshot, for example, can be done with:

          cat /dev/screen | topng > screenshot.png

          That combined with the way that parent processes can alter their children’s view of the filesystem namespace allows for extremely elegant abstractions. For example, every program just tries to write directly to screen or audio, but the desktop environment redirects their writes to the relevant servers. Which means that, in the absence of those servers, those same programs can run just fine and don’t care whether they’re being multiplexed or not. That also means that the plan9 userspace can be nested inside itself just using the normal mechanisms of how the OS works (that is, without a special tool like Docker).