this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2026
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    [–] BartyDeCanter@piefed.social 114 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (31 children)

    Stages of POSIX enlightenment:

    1. It couldn't possibly all be files
    2. It's all files
    3. What is a file, anyway?
    4. There's no such thing as a file
    5. It couldn't possibly all be files
    6. Everything is a file

    Most people stop at stage 2, stage 3 hits when you decide to write a filesystem, stage 4 when you've finished your first filesystem. Stage 5 is when you start working on kernel internals. No one can tell you how to reach stage 6, you must discover it for yourself.

    [–] Equinox1289@sh.itjust.works 5 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

    Okay, but what are blocks then? A file is really just a bunch of blocked stacked together with the inode metadata also sitting on another block, so is everything just blocks or because you can emulate a block device on a filesystem, are blocks themselves files? If that last part is true then files are infinitely recursive and my head is starting to spin.

    [–] jj4211@lemmy.world 1 points 9 hours ago

    The devnode that is used to reference the block is a file, so you come back to blocks just 'being offsets into some file'.

    Though system calls, ioctls and networking credibly get away from file semantics

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