Re: On re-working the major/minor system

Andries.Brouwer
2001-12-09T21:37:51Z

From: 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.

The Austin draft turned into POSIX 1003.1-2001 yesterday or so.

There is not much, but a few traces can be found.
For example, the pax archive format uses 8-byte devmajor and devminor fields.

(But to reassure others: no, this standard does not specify
major and minor in ls output, but just says
"If the file is a character special or block special file, the size of
the file may be replaced with implementation-defined information
associated with the device in question.")

Andries