Agree completely; the problem is that a clever-sounding slogan like "everything is a file" is so appealing to people that they want to believe it even if it's n

Agree completely; the problem is that a clever-sounding slogan like "everything is a file" is so appealing to people that they want to believe it even if it's not actually true. I've run into this before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2397039 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2397039 Here's another similar example of how "everything is a file" falls down that I wrote about in 2005 when complaining about terminals (http://www.advogato.org/person/habes/diary/6.html http://www.advogato.org/person/habes/diary/6.html) Then there's the whole mess of pseudo-terminals. If you are like me, you might wonder at first why pseudo-terminals are necessary. Why not just fork a shell and communicate with it over stdin/stdout? Well, the bad news there is that UNIX special-cases terminals. They're not just full-duplex byte streams, they also have to support some special system calls for things like setting the baud rate. And you might think that a change of window size would be delivered to the client program as an escape sequence. But no, it's delivered as a signal (and incidentally, sent from the terminal emulator as an ioctl()). Of course, you can't send ioctls over a network, so sending a resize from a telnet client to a telnet server is done in a totally different way (http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1073.html)