NAME

bif − Bell Interchange Format utilities

DESCRIPTION

BIF (Bell Interchange Format) is the name given to the format of mounted media used by HP 9000 Series 200 HP-UX releases 2.0 and 2.1, and by the HP Integral Personal Computer.  This format is based upon that used in AT&T System III UNIX. 

The BIF utilities listed under SEE ALSO below are provided for non-Series 200 (revision 2.0 and 2.1) and non-Integral Personal Computer access to the BIF media.  These utilities read and write data to and from BIF volumes, as well as retrieve and store information on BIF volumes. 

The BIF utilities listed below are the only HP-UX utilities that recognize the internal contents of a BIF volume. To the rest of HP-UX, a BIF volume is simply a file or disk containing unspecified data.  Therefore, do not use mount on a BIF volume; the operating system cannot recognize it.

BIF file names are specified to the BIF 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/rdsk/1s0:/users/ivy
specifies BIF file /users/ivy on HP-UX device special file /dev/rdsk/1s0

Note that this file naming convention is applicable only for use as arguments to the BIF utilities and does not constitute a legal path name for any other use within the HP-UX operating environment.  Shell (see sh(1)) “meta” characters *, ?, and [...] do not work for specifying an arbitrary pattern for file-name matching when using BIF utilities. 

If the device name and a trailing colon are specified without a file or directory name following, as in /dev/rdsk/1s0:, 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 its immediate children to use the BIF utilities at any given time. 

AUTHOR

bif utilities were developed by HP. 

SEE ALSO

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

Hewlett-Packard Company  —  HP-UX Release 9.0: August 1992