Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!necntc!ames!aurora!labrea!decwrl!pyramid!prls!philabs!micomvax!musocs!mcgill-vision!mouse From: mouse@mcgill-vision.UUCP (der Mouse) Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards Subject: Re: Large machines and tty naming conventions. Message-ID: <868@mcgill-vision.UUCP> Date: Mon, 24-Aug-87 00:52:39 EDT Article-I.D.: mcgill-v.868 Posted: Mon Aug 24 00:52:39 1987 Date-Received: Sat, 5-Sep-87 10:10:34 EDT References: <8550@brl-adm.ARPA> <6200@brl-smoke.ARPA> <382@altos86.UUCP> Organization: McGill University, Montreal Lines: 32 In article <382@altos86.UUCP>, scott@altos86.UUCP (Scott A. Rotondo) writes: > In article <6200@brl-smoke.ARPA> gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) ) writes: >> In article <8550@brl-adm.ARPA> jason@violet.Berkeley.EDU (Jason Venner) writes: >>> [...] making directorys in /dev and putting files in there [...] >> This is one of my favorite ideas. However, it does impact code such >> as "ps" that "knew" the old scheme. > I'm not certain I see why this has to impact code that knows about > the old scheme. Is there any reason you can't have both? Just make > the new directories contain links to the regular /dev entries. Now > you get the advantage of the faster searches while allowing old code > to work exactly as it always did. Unfortunately, you don't. The whole problem is that /dev is a large directory, ie, has many entries. If you don't get rid of the entries the current scheme requires, the problem won't go away. Just creating a subdirectory with alternate names for them won't do. That is, looking up /dev/tty/p3 is no faster than looking up /dev/ttyp3, since both of them have to search through /dev. The win occurs when /dev/ttyp3 doesn't exist and hence /dev is smaller, making searches through it faster. You could probably work a bit to arrange that the subdirectories appear first in /dev, but ensuring it stays that way would be harder. (What we need is a directory lookup scheme that's better than linear search. Anybody feel ambitious? :-) der Mouse (mouse@mcgill-vision.uucp)