Cherishing all nuggets of knowledge.

"Everything is a file" means that many of the system's components are represented as abstractions in the filesystem. It's simply an API that allows reading from and writing to it by integrating into the hierarchical file structure.

If you take a look inside /sys, you will find a fuckton of files, but they don't represent data stored on a mass storage medium. Instead, the directory contains a mounted sysfs filesystem that contains file-like representations of various parts and properties of the system. For example, you can read them like a file by running cat /sys/block/sda/queue/rotational to check if the sda block device is a spinning disk (1) or solid-state storage (0). Or you can write to them like a file by running echo 1 > /sys/block/sda/devices/delete to command sda's driver to detach the device. Similarly, /proc contains a mounted procfs filesystem that presents information about running processes as file-like entries; /dev contains a mounted devfs that points to various devices; and /tmp and /run contain tmpfs mounts for temporary storage in volatile memory (RAM or swap).

Windows uses various other APIs (like the Component Object Model and others) to accomplish the same that are not necessarily tied into the filesystem.

Isn't that.. Normal tho?

Why aren't the Linux devs just using SMB to forward the mouse and keyboard files? Are they stupid?

remoteuser@server$ nc -l -p 4444 > /dev/input/event0


localuser@laptop$ cat /dev/input/event0 | nc server 4444

I've figured out how to control computers remotely and I'll share the script:

Client:

#!/bin/bash
PASSWORD="your_password_here"
sshpass -p "$PASSWORD" scp /dev/stdin user@server:/path/to/cmd.txt <<< "$1"

Server:

#!/bin/bash
while true; do
    while IFS= read -r line; do
        eval "$line"
    done < "cmd.txt"
    > "cmd.txt"
done

Just chmod 777 both files and run as root, ez.

It's more a philosophy for Unix systems. When we say that "everything is a file", we're saying that even devices should show up on the filesystem (/dev), even network ports should show up on the filesystem, even processes should show up on the filesystem(/proc), etc... and that is as opposed to having a different system abstraction handle those functions instead.

Of course when you look deeper into it, linux does not explicitly follow that rule, it more just adheres to it. It's more a guideline than an explicit statement of fact

It could be a process, which you can talk to only via an IPC call. For example, dbus

Yeah I'm interested in how that works too.

I've recently been looking at the Nextcloud "all in one" Docker image. It works by mounting the docker.sock file into the master container, which allows that container to stand up a whole bunch of other containers on your machine.

How would that work on Windows, if the Docker socket isn't a file handle?