Device file

In Unix-like operating systems, a device file, device node, or special file is an interface to a device driver that appears in a file system as if it were an ordinary file. There are also special files in DOS, OS/2, and Windows. These special files allow an application program to interact with a device by using its device driver via standard input/output system calls. Using standard system calls simplifies many programming tasks, and leads to consistent user-space I/O mechanisms regardless of device features and functions.

Device files usually provide simple interfaces to standard devices (such as printers and serial ports), but can also be used to access specific unique resources on those devices, such as disk partitions. Additionally, device files are useful for accessing system resources that have no connection with any actual device, such as data sinks and random number generators.

There are two general kinds of device files in Unix-like operating systems, known as character special files and block special files. The difference between them lies in how much data is read and written by the operating system and hardware. These together can be called device special files in contrast to named pipes, which are not connected to a device but are not ordinary files either.

MS-DOS borrowed the concept of special files from Unix but renamed them devices. Because early versions of MS-DOS did not support a directory hierarchy, devices were distinguished from regular files by making their names reserved words that cannot be used as folder or file names; for example: the word CON is a reserved word. These were chosen for a degree of compatibility with CP/M and are still present in modern Windows for backwards compatibility. Names are not case-sensitive, so "con", "Con", and "CON" are all invalid names.

In Windows XP, entering "Con" into the Run command returns the error message, "This file does not have a program associated with it for performing this action. Create an association in the Folder Options control panel." Attempting to rename any file or folder using a reserved name silently reverts the file or folder to its previous name (or "New Folder", "New Text Document", etc.), with no notification or error message. In Windows Vista and later, attempting to use a reserved name for a file or folder brings up an error message saying, "The specified device name is invalid."

In some Unix-like systems, most device files are managed as part of a virtual file system traditionally mounted at /dev, possibly associated with a controlling daemon, which monitors hardware addition and removal at run time, making corresponding changes to the device file system if that's not automatically done by the kernel, and possibly invoking scripts in system or user space to handle special device needs. The FreeBSD, DragonFly BSD and Darwin have a dedicated file system devfs; device nodes are managed automatically by this file system, in kernel space. Linux used to have a similar devfs implementation, but it was abandoned later, and then removed since version 2.6.17; Linux now primarily uses a user space implementation known as udev, but there are many variants.

In Unix systems which support chroot process isolation, such as Solaris Containers, typically each chroot environment needs its own /dev; these mount points will be visible on the host OS at various nodes in the global file system tree. By restricting the device nodes populated into chroot instances of /dev, hardware isolation can be enforced by the chroot environment (a program can not meddle with hardware that it can neither see nor name—an even stronger form of access control than Unix file system permissions).

MS-DOS managed hardware device contention (see terminate-and-stay-resident program) by making each device file exclusive open. An application attempting to access a device already in use would discover itself unable to open the device file node. A variety of device driver semantics are implemented in Unix and Linux concerning concurrent access.