NAME

intro − introduction to special files

DESCRIPTION

This section describes various special files that refer to specific hardware peripherals, and UNIX system device drivers.  STREAMS [see intro(2)] software drivers, modules and the STREAMS-generic set of ioctl(2) system calls are also described. 

For hardware related files, the names of the entries are generally derived from names for the hardware, as opposed to the names of the special files themselves.  Characteristics of both the hardware device and the corresponding UNIX system device driver are discussed where applicable. 

Disk device file names are in the following format:

/dev/{r}dsk/c#d#s#
/dev/{r}dsk/k#d#s#  (for the second I/O)

where r indicates a raw interface to the disk, the c# indicates the controller number, d# indicates the device attached to the controller and s# indicates the section number of the partitioned device. 

September 29, 2021