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.