Hi All,

I was thinking about file descriptors in the context of Plan 9. On Unix an fd is generally only usable by the current process, and child ones through a fork with some special incantation if one wants to communicate one over a domain socket. This is possibly for security reasons, avoiding other users' processes from trying to guess the fd of a critical file.

It's common practice in Plan 9 to post an fd (sometimes via a pipe) from one process to the /srv filesystem so that others can discover it and open a comms channel. Does the kernel transform the fd into something when posted to /srv so that it can be consumed by any other process in the system?

Thanks,
Chris