"Everything is a file" is what made me start understanding linux few years ago and from there it got easier to use with each new concept.
Still this was really revolutionary to me when I first heard it. Made a bunch of things just click.
this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2026
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I may be dumb, been on linux too long or a combination of both. But what other way is there, does windows work differently? (regarding that)
"Everything is a file" means that many of the system's components are represented as abstractions in the filesystem. It's simply an API that allows reading from and writing to it by integrating into the hierarchical file structure.
If you take a look inside
/sys, you will find a fuckton of files, but they don't represent data stored on a mass storage medium. Instead, the directory contains a mountedsysfsfilesystem that contains file-like representations of various parts and properties of the system. For example, you can read them like a file by runningcat /sys/block/sda/queue/rotationalto check if thesdablock device is a spinning disk (1) or solid-state storage (0). Or you can write to them like a file by runningecho 1 > /sys/block/sda/devices/deleteto commandsda's driver to detach the device. Similarly,/proccontains a mountedprocfsfilesystem that presents information about running processes as file-like entries;/devcontains a mounteddevfsthat points to various devices; and/tmpand/runcontaintmpfsmounts for temporary storage in volatile memory (RAM or swap).Windows uses various other APIs (like the Component Object Model and others) to accomplish the same that are not necessarily tied into the filesystem.
Exactly the same concept as memory-mapped hardware I/O, or virtual file system drivers. Makes it so you don't have to think too much about implementation details and uses a common interface that's already there.
Sensible, yes.
But this is alien tech in windows land, if you're reading some device status or something, you need a special app for that.
Also, in unixoid systems, devices are files too.
Anyone interested in this concept should take a look at plan9. Everything is even more of a file there.
Taking a screenshot, for example, can be done with:
cat /dev/screen | topng > screenshot.pngThat combined with the way that parent processes can alter their children's view of the filesystem namespace allows for extremely elegant abstractions. For example, every program just tries to write directly to
screenoraudio, but the desktop environment redirects their writes to the relevant servers. Which means that, in the absence of those servers, those same programs can run just fine and don't care whether they're being multiplexed or not. That also means that the plan9 userspace can be nested inside itself just using the normal mechanisms of how the OS works (that is, without a special tool like Docker).π What kind of voodoo...
This is very interesting.
That is indeed seductive.
That might be part of it, but I was thinking it was more how things we don't think of as files, like sockets, are accessed with a file descriptor.
Also hardware is treated like a file in /dev
Hell, Bash provides filesystem-based sockets in
/dev/tcp, so a tcp connection can almost be like Unix sockets or anything else.I always found it weird that it was specifically provided by Bash...
Mind you, the registry is also just a couple of files that are shown to the user as "the registry". IIRC, on Windows, go into the user account's root folder, and you'll have NTUSER.dat. That's the HKCU hive for that user.
And that's precisely the difference. In both cases the configuration is data stored on disk but Linux presents it as files while Windows presents it as a registry tree. In Windows, you're not supposed to edit the registry by interacting with NTUSER.dat as a file.