man.postnix Miscellaneous man pages of Plan 9 related material

     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.

     Page 1                       Plan 9             (printed 11/2/25)