Those of you who have used a UNIX system before are probably familiar with the /proc filesystem. This directory provides a view of processes running on the system. Before getting into the gory details of the Solaris implementation (see proc(4) if you're curious), I thought I would go over some of the different variants over the years. You'll have to excuse any inaccuracies presented here; this is a rather quick blog entry that probably doesn't do the subject justice. Hopefully you'll be inspired to go investigate some of this on your own.more...
Traditionally, Unix/Linux/POSIX filenames can be almost any sequence of bytes, and their meaning is unassigned. The only real rules are that "/" is always the directory separator, and that filenames can't contain byte 0 (because this is the terminator). Although this is flexible, this creates many unnecessary problems. In particular, this lack of limitations makes it unnecessarily difficult to write correct programs (enabling many security flaws), makes it impossible to consistently and accurately display filenames, causes portability problems, and confuses users. more ....
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