INDIR 3
NAME
indir - attach to device indirectly by name
SYNOPSIS
"bind #*" name [\c
! spec\c ]
" dir" DESCRIPTION
Indir allows any other device to be referred to by its name instead of its perhaps arbitrary single character type;
indir itself has the type character
` * '. It has no name space of its own.
On attach (see
attach (5)) indir interprets its device specifier string as the
name of a device to which it should attach, optionally followed by specifier
spec for that device, separated from the
name by an exclamation mark.
Attaching to
indir (eg, by
sys-bind (2)), effectively attaches to the device with the given
name and
spec , and all subsequent operations in the resulting name space access that
device, not
indir itself.
For example, to access cap (3), one could write:
"bind -a '#*cap' /dev"The following commands both list the second instance of ether (3), first directly, then using indir :
"ls '#l1'""ls '#*ether!1'"
The file /dev/drivers (see cons (3)) lists the names of currently configured devices.
Credit
Invented by Bruce Ellis for Lucent's internal Research Inferno to help name dynamically-loaded device drivers.
This is a re-implementation.
SOURCE
/emu/port/devindir.c SEE ALSO
bind (1), sys-bind (2), cons (3) DIAGNOSTICS
If
name is not configured,
indir returns a suitable diagnostic in the error string.
BUGS
Arguably the kernel
could simply look up the
name itself.