Re: [MiNT] expanded /proc vs new /kern

[Guido Flohr <gufl0000@stud.uni-sb.de>]

Hi,

On Tue, Dec 07, 1999 at 10:21:58PM +0100, Konrad M. Kokoszkiewicz wrote:
> 
> > A proper tool
> > simply checks if the name matches the scheme %08s.%03d and then
> > retrieves all other information means of ioctl.
> 
> Nope, not even. A proper tool checks if the name matches the scheme
> `.%03d'. Anything else I would render "improper tool" :-) The part of the
> proc filename before a dot is documented as something that does not
> matter, and if something is named /proc/aessys.* you cannot guess that it
> actually _is_ the AES, because it can be anything.

Sure, in theory.
But in reality there are probably programs that rely on the fact that
names in /proc will never exceed 12 bytes (plus terminating null).  One of
these programs is the MiNT kernel by the way.

Extending /proc will lead to a whole bunch of problems.  It should also be
case-sensitive, it should allow all characters in the filenames.

There are better ways, documented, that probably even work under Magic to
find out the name of a specific process.  I would really prefer to avoid
the risk and say the filename is only an abbreviation/reminder for the
process name which should be found out with the documented ioctls if it
really matters.  This is also compliant with the quoted passage from the
compendium.

Ciao

Guido
-- 
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