Filesystem Daemons as a Unifying Mechanism for Network
Information Access
Steve Summit
Consultant, Seattle, Washington
Abstract
As the Net burgeons, new tools and protocols are being introduced to
permit some orderly use to be made of the wealth of information
available. These new protocols, however, often presuppose the use of
new, nonstandard, highly interactive user interfaces. This paper
presents a mechanism for unifying access to diverse network services
through filesystem daemons, which allow network information services
to be treated as if they were conventional files and directories,
residing in the local namespace, and accessed transparently with
standard tools. Besides normal filesystem operations ("open", "read",
"write", etc.), the daemons may introduce extended operations, which
provide generic access to such features as network database lookup
operations.
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