Unix filenames and drum memory (was: Files as files)

On Thu, 11 Jun 1998, Doug Yowza <yowza(a)yowza.com> wrote: ] That used to be one of my interview questions for Unix programmers: your ] buggy program just created a filename with {control characters, leading ] dash (-), leading slash (/), '*', etc} in it. How do you delete it? Oh shoot. And I thought I was Unix-competent. I thought the only way to put a slash in a filename was with a low-level filesystem hack. I mean, the OS calls themselves will take "a/b" to mean file "b" in directory "a", right? It isn't up to your program to parse the filename that way. That isn't something you can get get around, even with any ordinary sort of bug. Is it? Of course, given root permission, you could run the appropriate disk utility, open /dev/root as a file, find the directory block, and put anything you like in a filename. But then you would have to do the same thing to access that file or get rid of it, wouldn't you? How could 'rm' get around that? ObCC: I just noticed /dev/drum on a Dec here. Now I *know* there is not a drum on this thing, so this must be a holdover from some earlier implementation of some Unix. True? Were filesystems on drums managed the same as those on disks? I don't see any reason why they wouldn't be, offhand. But I thought drums died out before Unix appeared. Does anyone still have a functional magnetic drum memory? That would be one _awesome_ peripheral. :-) Bill.