Streams line disciplines (was POSIX bashing, cooked vs raw or cbreak mode)

[DaviD W. Sanderson]

In article <1991Apr11.140508.9012 at athena.mit.edu> jik at athena.mit.edu (Jonathan I. Kamens) writes:
>  The way Multics did things was by allowing users to plug their own input
>interface library in between the terminal and whatever programs they were
>running. [...]
>  Now, I've never programmed with streams, but I was under the impression that
>it's possible to use them to do something like this.  Can't the user write a
>streams driver that does his line-editing [...]

Well, sort of.  Once installed, streams modules can be pushed and
popped by an ordinary user, but since they are linked into the kernel
they must be installed by root.  I imagine it would be possible (since
the RFS file system type does something like it) to write a special
streams module that would communicate with some specifiable user-level
process to perform the user-interface functions, but it would probably
not be worth it.
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      / __\  U N S H I N E	           DaviD W. Sanderson
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