MKNOD(8) BSD System Manager's Manual MKNOD(8)
mknod - build special file
mknod [-m mode] name [b | c] major minor
mknod [-m mode] name p
The mknod command creates device special files. Normally the shell script
/dev/MAKEDEV is used to create special files for commonly known devices;
it executes mknod with the appropriate arguments and can make all the
files required for the device.
The options are as follows:
-m mode
Set the file mode. mode may be absolute or symbolic, as described
in chmod(1). In symbolic mode strings, the '+' and '-' operators
are interpreted relative to an assumed initial mode of "a=rw".
To make nodes manually, the arguments are:
name Device or FIFO name. For example "sd" for a SCSI disk or a "pty"
for pseudo-devices. FIFOs may be named arbitrarily by the user.
b | c | p
Type of device or FIFO. If the device is a block type device such
as a tape or disk drive which needs both cooked and raw special
files, the type is b. All other devices are character type dev-
ices, such as terminal and pseudo devices, and are type c. A FIFO
(also known as a named pipe) is type p.
major The major device number is an integer number which tells the ker-
nel which device driver entry point to use. To learn what major
device number to use for a particular device, check the file
/dev/MAKEDEV to see if the device is known.
minor The minor device number tells the kernel which subunit the node
corresponds to on the device; for example, a subunit may be a
filesystem partition or a tty line.
Major and minor device numbers can be given in any format accept-
able to strtoul(3), so that a leading "0x" indicates a hexade-
cimal number, and a leading "0" will cause the number to be in-
terpreted as octal.
chmod(1), mkfifo(1), mkfifo(2), mknod(2), MAKEDEV(8)
A mknod command appeared in Version 6 AT&T UNIX.
MirOS BSD #10-current November 22, 2009 1
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