Devices on Unix/Linux
Unix treats devices uniformly as byte-streams (like files).
Devices can be accessed via the file system under /dev, e.g.
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/dev/diskN ... (part of) a hard drive
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/dev/ttyN ... a terminal device
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/dev/ptyN ... a pseudo-terminal device
Other interesting "devices" in /dev
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/dev/mem ... the physical memory (mostly protected)
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/dev/null ... data sink or empty source
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/dev/random ... stream of pseudo-random numbers
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