Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!apple!zorba!dtynan
From: johnl@esegue.segue.boston.ma.us (John R. Levine)
Newsgroups: comp.unix
Subject: Re: An idea probably discarded many times
Message-ID: <3507@zorba.Tynan.COM>
Date: 27 Oct 89 04:47:22 GMT
References: <3481@zorba.Tynan.COM> <3495@zorba.Tynan.COM>
Sender: dtynan@zorba.Tynan.COM
Reply-To: uunet!esegue.segue.boston.ma.us!johnl (John R. Levine)
Organization: Segue Software, Cambridge MA
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Approved: dtynan@zorba.Tynan.COM

In article <3495@zorba.Tynan.COM> larry@macom1.UUCP (Larry Taborek) writes:
>> I think it would be a nice addition to Unix to have a virtual
>> '/proc' directory mounted in the file system.  ...

>I'm no wizard Roger but it seems to me that updating the process table in
>memory would be a lot faster than the system calls needed to create an entry
>in the file system and directory needed only to post some inode information
>that is already available in the process tables. (whew!) [spelling corrected]

Who said anything about creating file system entries?  In
implementations of /proc that I've heard of, it's a virtual rather
than real file system, which means that its contents are created on
the fly when somebody opens and reads or writes one of the files in
it.  If nobody's looking in /proc, there's no work to do.
-- 
John R. Levine, Segue Software, POB 349, Cambridge MA 02238, +1 617 864 9650
johnl@esegue.segue.boston.ma.us, {ima|lotus|spdcc}!esegue!johnl
Massachusetts has over 100,000 unlicensed drivers.  -The Globe