Re: PROPOSAL: dot-proc interface [was: /proc stuff]

[SpaceWalker]

Jakob Østergaard wrote:
> 
> On Sun, Nov 04, 2001 at 06:28:47PM +0100, Daniel Phillips wrote:
> > On November 4, 2001 05:45 pm, Tim Jansen wrote:
> > > > The dot-proc file is basically a binary encoding of Lisp (or XML), e.g. it
> > > > is a list of elements, wherein an element can itself be a list (or a
> > >
> > > Why would anybody want a binary encoding?
> >
> > Because they have a computer?
> 
> Yes - good reason  :)
> 
> The "fuzzy parsing" userland has to do today to get useful information
> out of many proc files today is not nice at all.  It eats CPU, it's
> error-prone, and all in all it's just "wrong".
> 
> However - having a human-readable /proc that you can use directly with
> cat, echo,  your scripts,  simple programs using read(), etc.   is absolutely
> a *very* cool feature that I don't want to let go.  It is just too damn
> practical.
> 
> But building a piece of software that needs to reliably read out status
> information from a system providing something more and more resembling a GUI in
> text-files is becoming unnecessarily time-consuming and error-prone.
> 
> >
> > > It needs special parsers and will be almost impossible to access from shell
> > > scripts.
> >
> > No, look, he's proposing to put the binary encoding in hidden .files.  The
> > good old /proc files will continue to appear and operate as they do now.
> >
> 
> Exactly.
> 
> --
> ................................................................
> :   [e-mail]   : And I see the elder races,         :
> :.........................: putrid forms of man                :
> :   Jakob Østergaard      : See him rise and claim the earth,  :
> :        OZ9ABN           : his downfall is at hand.           :
> :.........................:............{Konkhra}...............:
> -
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
> the body of a message to [e-mail]
> More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
> Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/

A good reason could be that a simple ps -aux uses hundreds of system
calls to get the list of all the processes ...
-- 
SpaceWalker

[e-mail]
ICQ 36157579