programmatic devices

[adam.v.reed]

In article <10641 at ucsd.Edu>, brian at ucsd.Edu (Brian Kantor) writes:
> A programmatic device (pdev) is a program (an executable binary) living
> in the /dev directory.  When a user program tries to open it for
> reading or writing, a process is started that runs the program, and
....
> Oh, and if this isn't an original idea, pardon me.  I honestly can't
> remember having heard of this before in the Unix world.  (It is vaguely

This looks (except for some ad-hoc details) like a trivial
instance of a stream device with a single stream module.
Why write if you can buy?
				Adam_V_Reed at ATT.com