Review Chapter 10, Filesystems and Disk Management,
particularly “Accessing Filesystems,” p. 312, in Linux System Administration
Under Linux and Unix, devices are files.
Information being sent to the device is written to the file.
Information being sent from the device is read from the file.
All devices exist as files in the /dev directory.
In a terminal, issue the command:
ls /dev
to see all the devices available to your system.
What types of devices are in /dev?
- Serial ports
- Parallel ports
- USB ports
- NICs
- Modems
- All physical devices
Drives, which include hard drives, floppy drives, CD drives and USB drives, are mountable devices.
Generally, hard drives are mounted during the boot process. This “hooks” them into the directory tree.