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Virtual Device
A virtual device in Unix is a file such as :/dev/null or :/dev/urandom, that is treated as a device, as far as user level software is concerned, but is generated by the kernel (operating system), kernel without reference to hardware. For instance when /dev/null is written to, the kernel tells the program it wrote everything to it (without actually writing it anywhere), and when read from, the reading program is told that it has reached the end of the file. It is a device file (it can be made with mknod for instance), but does not reference any hardware. DOS-, Microsoft Windows, Windows- and OS/2-like operating systems define the NUL device that performs a similar function (but is implemented as part of the file name processing – no actual file exists by that name). Unix file system technology {{Unix-stub de:Gerätedatei es:Fichero de dispositivo pt:Nó de dispositivo ru:/dev ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Unix
Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others. Initially intended for use inside the Bell System, AT&T licensed Unix to outside parties in the late 1970s, leading to a variety of both academic and commercial Unix variants from vendors including University of California, Berkeley ( BSD), Microsoft (Xenix), Sun Microsystems ( SunOS/ Solaris), HP/ HPE ( HP-UX), and IBM ( AIX). The early versions of Unix—which are retrospectively referred to as " Research Unix"—ran on computers such as the PDP-11 and VAX; Unix was commonly used on minicomputers and mainframes from the 1970s onwards. It distinguished itself from its predecessors as the first portable operating system: almost the entire operating system is written in the C programming language (in 1973), which allows U ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
