Le 25/12/2020 à 18:18, Hendrik Boom a écrit :
>>> Hearing this thread's perplexity, I long for the days of mknod.
>> But that wouldn't have helped with the network interfaces, because (in
>> an un-Unixy way) their names have never been file names on the systems
>> we're discussing now.
> I wonder why. Historical accident? Or some deep technical reason?

    I guess it's historical: historically there was only character
devices and block devices, and no provision for other categories, and
maybe no provision in the bitfields which qualify the associated special
files.

   These device special files are used in particular to write to and
read from and I think nobody wants this to happen with network devices.
AFAIU, there are a lot of devices which don't show up in /dev, like all
the intermediate devices, the ones which handle USB, SCSI, SATA, PCI.

--         Didier