Quote:
Originally Posted by BSDfan666
The "ctl" utilities are a key part of BSD, they don't "ignore" the everything is a file concept.. but they also don't overuse it like Plan 9/Linux did/do.
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I have to disagree with the "overuse" comment. Unix was originally designed to have everything accessible through the filesystem. Ironically it was the way the original BSD handled network devices that led future Unix and Unix-like OSs away from this idea. Plan 9 was/is (it's not dead; in fact it's still being actively developed, and under an open source license) a return to and an expansion on the idea, and the FUSE project is doing the same for Unix and Unix-like OSs, including NetBSD.
The idea behind using the filesystem is to give a consistent way to interact with the system, facilitating another tenet of Unix philosophy: "Do one thing and do it well." Of course many systems, for better or for worse, have gone away from that, but in general I think both using the filesystem to access everything and using small tools and putting them together instead of huge kitchen sink programs is the way I want to do things. It keeps things simple.