From owner-freebsd-hackers Fri Jul 28 16:13:55 1995 Return-Path: hackers-owner Received: (from majordom@localhost) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.11/8.6.6) id QAA14251 for hackers-outgoing; Fri, 28 Jul 1995 16:13:55 -0700 Received: from mercury.Sun.COM (mercury.Sun.COM [192.9.25.1]) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.11/8.6.6) with ESMTP id QAA14245 for ; Fri, 28 Jul 1995 16:13:53 -0700 Received: from Eng.Sun.COM by mercury.Sun.COM (Sun.COM) id QAA08726; Fri, 28 Jul 1995 16:12:40 -0700 Received: from plokta.Eng.Sun.COM by Eng.Sun.COM (5.x/SMI-5.3) id AA14658; Fri, 28 Jul 1995 16:12:36 -0700 Received: by plokta.Eng.Sun.COM (5.x/SMI-SVR4) id AA14960; Fri, 28 Jul 1995 16:12:36 -0700 Date: Fri, 28 Jul 1995 16:12:36 -0700 Message-Id: <9507282312.AA14960@plokta.Eng.Sun.COM> From: "Bryan O'Sullivan" To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" Cc: Peter da Silva , hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: your mail In-Reply-To: <8635.806962669@time.cdrom.com> References: <199507281212.HAA27841@bonkers.taronga.com> <8635.806962669@time.cdrom.com> Sender: hackers-owner@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk j> So how do you do "out of band" operations, like telling a tape j> drive to skip forward to the next mark? You have a control file associated with it. As a hypothetical example, a terminal would have one file for doing character reads and writes, and another for reading and writing control commands like set/get baud rate, and so on. The system works pretty well, though I have a notion that retrofitting something similar onto would be pointless.