Re: On re-working the major/minor system

Kai Henningsen
2001-12-11T20:58:08Z

hpa@zytor.com (H. Peter Anvin) wrote on 09.12.01 in <9v0mo1$ms$1@cesium.transmeta.com>:

> By author: kaih@khms.westfalen.de (Kai Henningsen)

> > > The C library, and the POSIX standard, etc, etc.
> >
> > I think you'll find that there is *NOTHING* in either the C standard,
> > POSIX, or the Austin future-{POSIX,UNIX} standard that knows about major
> > or minor numbers.
> >
>
> It's not "future" anymore... Austin is now IEEE 1003.1-2001 and thus
> the new POSIX standard.

As of this Friday, yes.

> Anyway, look for things like tar, cpio, ISO 9660 and that class of
> standards.

Well, at least in Austin there is neither tar, cpio, nor 9660.

You are, however, right insofar as there's pax, which for ustar format has
devmajor and devminor fields of 8 octets each, which contain unspecified
information. (cpio format just has the rdev field.)

MfG Kai