From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <1fc0d9800805300232g1702ec44tab75434519fd7954@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 30 May 2008 02:32:46 -0700
From: "Nick LaForge" <nicklaforge@gmail.com>
To: "Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs" <9fans@9fans.net>
In-Reply-To: <3351ceae37b2c79dcd7398c7029b52d9@terzarima.net>
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References: <fa0bc3ba-39ed-4143-8f08-ac853ee5aee3@m73g2000hsh.googlegroups.com>
	<3351ceae37b2c79dcd7398c7029b52d9@terzarima.net>
Subject: Re: [9fans] read/write offset hack
Topicbox-Message-UUID: b03850e0-ead3-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025

> Poking around Plan 9 and 9P, I was wondering whether it would be a
> neat hack or some sort of abuse to read and write dynamically served
> files at different offsets to get different semantics, instead of
> reading and writing different files (ctl, clone, etc.) to do that.

> Given that the system encourages to perceive files as having arbitrary
> semantics (as opposed to having regular sequential file semantics) it
> would make sense (to me) to have reads and writes at arbitrary offsets
> to have arbitrary semantics as well -- that's, after all, what offset
> (kind of) does on a regular file, too, although in a rather trivial
> way.

> ...but my spider-sense is telling me this would probably be either
> rather pointless, or troublesome, or prohibited. Please set me
> straight.

this is excellent!  The only thing you need now is a new name to mark
the address of the new block, a mechanism to seek to this address,
and an interface to standard I/O such that writes append to the block's
end.

nkl