Re: On re-working the major/minor system

[Andries.Brouwer@cwi.nl]

    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