Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!aplcen!haven!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: How secure are shell scripts? (summary)
Message-ID: <14145@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 14 Oct 90 03:46:34 GMT
References: <15059@hydra.gatech.EDU> <7937@star.cs.vu.nl> <4193@lib.tmc.edu>
Organization: U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory, APG, MD.
Lines: 14

In article <4193@lib.tmc.edu> jmaynard@thesis1.hsch.utexas.edu (Jay Maynard) writes:
>This is a new one on me. What's /dev/fd supposed to do ...
>where can it be obtained?

"/dev/fd/7" is a handle that returns another available file descriptor
that is a duplicate of the current file descriptor # 7.  (Similarly for
other numbers.  Also, /dev/stdin is often provided as a link to /dev/fd/0,
etc.)  I think this first showed up on Research UNIX 8th Edition.  Other
implementations have been provided, for example 4.4BSD probably will have
this.

It is not generally a good idea to try to install a device driver obtained
from elsewhere, unless you are competent to produce the driver yourself.
In the case of /dev/fd, it is pretty easy to implement for yourself.


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