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yet - you still have to learn opaque crap. example

echo kill > /proc/123/ctl

Sure, that works if you know kill, but you cannot inspect ctl and understand the interface, its a write interface. so you can certainly RTFM, read the dev proc list, etc. it's not discoverable

so like /proc/net/stat or whatever, it means nothing to me... its gonna just be a TSV of bytes that mean something, unless you know it.

so for all the simplicity, it's what i would call, not very usable.



Ok, but there's nothing stopping from writing a "discoverable" GUI or TUI or CLI for this interaction.

To the user it doesn't matter.

To the developer, it makes a difference.

/proc/<pid>/ctl is not any more or less simple or discoverable for the end user than TerminateProcess or kill(2). It's all opaque esoteric stuff.

But for the developer /proc/<pid>/ctl is MORE discoverable than TerminateProcess or kill(2), since it's a file you can list, so you know it exists. Yeah, you still have to read the man page (you always have to read the docs as a developer), but you know there's a ctl file that probably controls some stuff about the process there. And you already know how to interact with it (the same IO interface as everything else).


Of course. But it's not implemented. The OS is the spec.


I guess in theory there is nothing stopping the system from providing yet other files, like say "/proc/123/ctl/description" which provides a human-readable description of what "/proc/123/ctl" does, and "/proc/123/ctl/schema" which provides a standardized schema for interacting with the parent, akin to a XSD or JSON Schema.


No there's not. Other than plan9 does not have it and it was not considered important.




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