NAME

BIF − Bell Interchange Format utilities

HP-UX COMPATIBILITY

Level: Bell System III - HP-UX/NUCLEUS

Origin: HP

DESCRIPTION

BIF (Bell Interchange Format) is the name given to the format of mounted media used by HP-UX series 200 revisions 2.0 and 2.1.  This format is based upon that used in System III Unix. 
 

These utilities are provided for reading and writing data to and from BIF volumes.  These utilities (referred to hereafter as bif∗(1)) may be used to retrieve and store information on a BIF volume. 

The bif∗(1) utilities are the only utilities within HP-UX where the internal contents of a BIF volume are known. To the rest of HP-UX a BIF volume is simply a file/disk containing some unspecified data.  You must not use mount(1) on a BIF volume, since the operating system does not recognize it. 

BIF file names are specified to the bif∗(1) utilities by concatenating the HP-UX path name for the BIF volume with the BIF file name, separating the two with a colon (:).  For example,

/dev/fd.0:/users/ivy specifies BIF file /users/ivy within HP-UX device special file /dev/fd.0. 

Note that this file naming convention is applicable only for use as arguments to the bif∗(1) utilities and does not constitute a legal path name for any other use within HP-UX.  The shell sh(1) "meta" characters: * ? and [...] do not work for specifying an arbitrary pattern for file name matching when using the BIF utilities. 

If the device name and a trailing colon are specified without a file or directory name following (e.g. /dev/rfd.0:), then the root (/) of the BIF file system is assumed by convention. 

A primitive form of data protection is provided by a lockfile /tmp/BIF..LCK that only allows one process and it’s immediate children to use the bif utilities at a time. 

SEE ALSO

bifchmod(1), bifchown(1), bifcp(1), bifdf(1), biffind(1), biffsck(1), biffsdb(1), bifls(1), bifmkdir(1), bifmkfs(1), bifrm(1). 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Hewlett-Packard  —  last mod. May 11, 2021