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NAME

indir - attach to device indirectly by name

SYNOPSIS

bind #*name [!spec] 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
/os/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.

INDIR(3 ) Rev:  Thu Feb 15 14:43:36 GMT 2007