INDIR(3) INDIR(3)
NAME
indir - attach to device indirectly by name
SYNOPSIS
bind #*name [!spec] dir
DESCRIPTION
Indir allows any other device to be referred to by its name
instead of its perhaps arbitrary single character type;
indir itself has the type character `*'. It has no name
space of its own. On attach (see attach(5)) indir inter-
prets its device specifier string as the name of a device to
which it should attach, optionally followed by specifier
spec for that device, separated from the name by an exclama-
tion mark. Attaching to indir (eg, by sys-bind(2)), effec-
tively attaches to the device with the given name and spec,
and all subsequent operations in the resulting name space
access that device, not indir itself.
For example, to access cap(3), one could write:
bind -a '#*cap' /dev
The following commands both list the second instance of
ether(3), first directly, then using indir:
ls '#l1'
ls '#*ether!1'
The file /dev/drivers (see cons(3)) lists the names of cur-
rently configured devices.
Credit
Invented by Bruce Ellis for Lucent's internal Research
Inferno to help name dynamically-loaded device drivers.
This is a re-implementation.
SOURCE
/emu/port/devindir.c
/os/port/devindir.c
SEE ALSO
bind(1), sys-bind(2), cons(3)
DIAGNOSTICS
If name is not configured, indir returns a suitable diagnos-
tic in the error string.
BUGS
Arguably the kernel could simply look up the name itself.
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