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This quibbling semantics. That's like saying a ball isn't really a ball because it's not curved at a molecular level. It's true and it'd interesting in it's own

This quibbling semantics. That's like saying a ball isn't really a ball because it's not curved at a molecular level. It's true and it'd interesting in it's own sense, but not at all relevant to the real world discussion at hand, and not a refutation of anything in context ("had me until the end..."). Yes, the wording around "file" is a bit ambiguous, because Unix has a major design philosophy that said you can treat non files as files as get a lot of mileage, but didn't call those things "fauxles" or something instead.

lisper 8y ago
> This quibbling semantics No, it's quibbling pedagogy. > Yes, the wording around "file" is a bit ambiguous Exactly. And this can be a real problem when people are first learning about unix. In fact, it can be a real problem even after that. Just the other day (true story) I was trying to debug some server latency issues and I asked one of our sysadmins for help. He suggested that I run lsof to help debug the problem. I told him I was pretty sure that wouldn't help because all the evidence indicated that the problem was with a rogue process, not a file, and he said, "This is unix. Everything is a file."