Even PowerShell's flawed and limited execution definitively proves how terribly misguided and morally bankrupt the pin-headed one-dimensional "everything is a file" Unix philosophy is, especially with its the ridiculously hard-to-parse ad-hoc non-standard mixed-bag syntax of /proc and /etc files, which would have been much better simply using xml or json, yet which don't even come close to achieving that low bar of machine readability and ease of scripting.

If everything is a file, then why the fuck is the insufferable abomination of ioctl so crucial to haphazardly papier-mâché and duct tape over all the uncanny gaps and gaping cracks?

Yet another strike against the mindless cargo cult nonsense and unquestioning sycophantic hero worship of TAOUP.

https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf

13 The File System

Sure It Corrupts Your Files,
But Look How Fast It Is!

Pretty daring of you to be storing important files on a Unix system.
—Robert E. Seastrom

The traditional Unix file system is a grotesque hack that, over the years,
has been enshrined as a “standard” by virtue of its widespread use. Indeed,
after years of indoctrination and brainwashing, people now accept Unix’s
flaws as desired features. It’s like a cancer victim’s immune system
enshrining the carcinoma cell as ideal because the body is so good at making them.

Way back in the chapter “Welcome, New User” we started a list of what’s
wrong with the Unix file systems. For users, we wrote, the the most obvious failing is that the file systems don’t have version numbers and Unix
doesn’t have an “undelete” capability—two faults that combine like
sodium and water in the hands of most users.

But the real faults of Unix file systems run far deeper than these two missing features. The faults are not faults of execution, but of ideology. With
Unix, we often are told that “everything is a file.” Thus, it’s not surprising
that many of Unix’s fundamental faults lie with the file system as well.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26604833

Ask HN: What are the bad parts of Unix?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26613607

lapsed_lisper on March 28, 2021 | prev | next [–]

[...]

But I also think there's a deeper set of problems in the "genetics" of Unix, in that it supports a "reductive" form of problem solving, but doesn't help at all if you want to build abstractions. Let's say one of the core ideas in Unix is "everything is a file", i.e., read/write/seek/etc. is the universal interface across devices, files, pipes, etc.). "Everything is a file" insulates a program from some (but not all!) irrelevant details of the mechanics of moving bytes into and out of RAM... by forcing all programs to contend with even more profoundly irrelevant details about how those bytes in RAM should be interpreted as data in the program! While it is sometimes useful to be able to peek or poke at bits in stray spots, most programs implicitly or explicitly traffic in in data relevant to that program. While every such datum must be /realized/ as bytes somewhere, operating on some datum's realization /as bytes/ (or by convention, as text) is mostly a place to make mistakes.

Here's an example: consider the question "who uses bash as their login shell?" A classical "Unixy" methodology to attacking such a problem is supposed to be to (a) figure out how to get a byte stream containing the information you want, and then (b) figure out how to apply some tools to extract and perhaps transform that stream into the desired stream. So maybe you know that /etc/passwd one way to get that stream on your system, and you decide to use awk for this problem, and type

awk -F: '$6 ~ "bash$" { print $1 }' /etc/passwd

That's a nicely compact expression! Sadly, it's an incorrect one to apply to /etc/passwd to get the desired answer (at least on my hosts), because the login shell in the 7th field, not the 6th. Now, this is just a trivial little error, but that's why I like it as an example. Even in the most trivial cases, reducing anything to a byte stream does mean you can use any general purpose tool to a problem, but it also means that any such usage is going to reinvent the wheel in exact proportion to how directly it's using that byte stream; and that reinvention is a source of needless error.

Of course the sensible thing to do in all but the most contrived cases is to perform your handling of byte-level representations with a dedicated a library that provides at least some abstraction over the representation details; even thin and unsafe abstractions like C structs are better than nothing. (Anything less than a library is imperfect: if all you've got is a separate process on a pipe, you've just traded one byte stream problem for another. Maybe the one you get is easier than the one you started with, but still admits the same kinds of incorrect byte interpretation errors.) And so "everything is a file", which was supposed to be great faciltiy to help put things together, is usually just an utterly irrelevant implementation detail beneath libraries.

[...]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Everything_is_a_file

Origin of the phrase "Everything is a File"

The writings of the original UNIX people are well-scrutinized yet there is no sign of them having written this phrase ever. I think the phrase is not authentic. The article is self-defeating in that it states "some IPC" is a file, meaning "not everything is a file as some IPC is not. The phrase is used as a joke in at least one presentation.

"What UNIX Cost Us" - Benno Rice (LCA 2020):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-IWMbJXoLM#t=24m35s

>UNIX is a hell of a thing. From starting as a skunkworks project in Bell Labs to accidentally dominating the computer industry it's a huge part of the landscape that we work within. The thing is, was it the best thing we could have had? What could have been done better?

>Join me for a bit of meditation on what else existed then, what was gained, what was lost, and what could (and should) be re-learned.

>Complex problem have simple, easy to understand, wrong answers.

>Understand the past, but don't let it bind the future.