Linux Administration Cookbook

/dev

If I had to choose a favorite pseudo-filesystems, I would be one odd individual, but if you forced me, it would probably be /dev.

This isn't because of some love for the word dev or some affinity for its overuse, but rather because I find myself inside it so often.

As with all of the pseudo-filesystems, they're transient and temporary (tmpfs). Don't do as I once saw a colleague do and store things in them, because the moment you reboot your box: poof, your files are gone.

On the surface, /dev looks messy:

$ ls /dev/autofs           hugepages           port    shm       tty18  tty33  tty49  tty7     vcs6block            hwrng               ppp     snapshot  tty19  tty34  tty5   tty8     vcsabsg              initctl             ptmx    snd       tty2   tty35  tty50  tty9     vcsa1btrfs-control    input               pts     stderr    tty20  tty36  tty51  ttyS0    vcsa2char kmsg ...