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Comment by barhun | Hacker News Reader

+ "On UNIX, the adage goes, everything is a file."

- not all the things on unix are abstracted as files (or 'byte streams' to be more accurate). however, i/o resources and some ipc facilities are defined so. an operating system provides many other abstractions in addition to these such as processes, threads, non-stream devices, concurrency and synchronization primitives, etc.; thus it's absolutely wrong to say that everything is a file on unix.

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Most notably: network sockets do not have file-like semantics, mainly because they were introduced as a concept and implemented long after the system was designed. Plan9 is an effort to revise all system objects to be accessible with the same file-like fopen/fclose system calls.

"Everything is a file on UNIX" is as true as "Vulcan's cannot lie."

I assume Vulcans can lie?

Technically they cannot lie. But they can exaggerate. Or omit facts.

Great analogy.

Only one ipc primitive (fifo) can be used with man 2 read or write. Sysv ipc cannot, sockets (any domain) cannot (unless there is a kernel interface via /proc or another pseudo fs). What is meant by this saying (and the way it is has been used in my experience) is that everything in unix _looks_ like a file. That is usually meant in reference to the C API which has some r[ec]v|read|write|snd type namespace.

You can read(2) and write(2) to a socket, although it is more normal to recv and send on it. On Linux, you can also (and pretty much MUST) read(2) and write(2) to an eventfd; you can read(2) from a timerfd. That said, the semantics of the latter are considerably different from that of fifos or sockets.

You are right. I've long forgotten about read() and write() compat with sockets for very good reason. I don't lump an eventfd into the same IPC category as those mentioned in parent for the semantic(s) reason you mention and also for it's intended usage.

Could this provide an example please?

Only for those like me, who are wondering...^^

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