"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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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.