[Gllug] Fireing up an external SCSI device once the system has started.

[tet at accucard.com]

>I must find out more about the /proc filesystem too.  I don't understand 
>how you can pipe something to a file that doesn't seem to be quite there, 
>not even as a symlink to something I might understand.

Because it's really *not* there. /proc is basically just the kernel
exposing information to userland. It happens to use filesystem
semantics to do so (rather than, say, a system call), because it's
a convenient interface for some things. The kernel effectively has
a filesystem driver for procfs, so that when you cat a file, instead
of reading blocks from disk, it reads information from kernel data
structures instead. Similarly, writing to /proc updates the relevant
data structures (although not all can be written to).

>If so, are there any fun - or time wasting - things that could be piped to 
>the /proc system?

Yes, plenty! See /sur/src/linux/Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt for
an incomplete list.

Tet


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