May 2004
Beginner
368 pages
8h 44m
English
You will find it very easy to manipulate devices on a Unix system because the kernel normally presents the device I/O interface to system and user processes as files. Not only can a programmer use regular file operations to work with a device, but some devices are also accessible to standard programs like cat, so you don't have to be a programmer to use a device. Linux uses the same design of device files as other Unix flavors, but device filenames and functionality vary among flavors.
Linix device files are in the /dev directory, and running ls /dev reveals that there are more than a few files in /dev. So how do you work with devices?
To get started, consider this command:
echo blah blah > /dev/null
Like any command with redirected output, ...