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Red Hat® Linux® 7 Unleashed
book

Red Hat® Linux® 7 Unleashed

by Bill Ball, David Pitts
October 2000
Intermediate to advanced
1152 pages
26h 41m
English
Sams
Content preview from Red Hat® Linux® 7 Unleashed

Character Devices

Character devices offer a flow of data that must be read in order. Whereas block devices enable a seek to select the next block of data transferred, for example, from one edge or the other of a diskette, character devices represent hardware that doesn't have this capability. An example is a terminal, for which the next character to be read is whatever key you type at the keyboard.

In fact, because there are only two basic types of devices, block and character, all hardware is represented as one or the other, rather like the animal and vegetable kingdoms of biological classification. Inevitably, this means that a few devices don't quite fit into this classification scheme. Examples include tape drives, generic SCSI devices, and ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0672319853Purchase book