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mknod(1m) [opensolaris man page]

mknod(1M)						  System Administration Commands						 mknod(1M)

NAME
mknod - make a special file SYNOPSIS
mknod name b major minor mknod name c major minor mknod name p DESCRIPTION
mknod makes a directory entry for a special file. OPTIONS
The following options are supported: b Create a block-type special file. c Create a character-type special file. p Create a FIFO (named pipe). OPERANDS
The following operands are supported: major The major device number. minor The minor device number; can be either decimal or octal. The assignment of major device numbers is specific to each system. You must be the super-user to use this form of the command. name A special file to be created. USAGE
See largefile(5) for the description of the behavior of mknod when encountering files greater than or equal to 2 Gbyte ( 2^31 bytes). ATTRIBUTES
See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes: +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ | ATTRIBUTE TYPE | ATTRIBUTE VALUE | +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ |Availability |SUNWcsu | +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ SEE ALSO
ftp(1), in.ftpd(1M), mknod(2), symlink(2), attributes(5), largefile(5) NOTES
If mknod(2) is used to create a device, the major and minor device numbers are always interpreted by the kernel running on that machine. With the advent of physical device naming, it would be preferable to create a symbolic link to the physical name of the device (in the /devices subtree) rather than using mknod. SunOS 5.11 16 Sep 1996 mknod(1M)

Check Out this Related Man Page

MKNOD(8)						    BSD System Manager's Manual 						  MKNOD(8)

NAME
mknod -- build special file SYNOPSIS
mknod name mknod name [b | c] major minor [owner:group] DESCRIPTION
The mknod utility is deprecated on modern FreeBSD systems. The mknod utility creates device special files. To make nodes manually, the arguments are: name Device name, for example /dev/da0 for a SCSI disk or /dev/pts/0 for pseudo-terminals. b | c Type of device. 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 devices, such as terminal and pseudo devices, and are type c. major The major device number is an integer number which tells the kernel which device driver entry point to use. minor The minor device number tells the kernel which subunit the node corresponds to on the device; for example, a subunit may be a file system partition or a tty line. owner:group The owner group operand pair is optional, however, if one is specified, they both must be specified. The owner may be either a numeric user ID or a user name. If a user name is also a numeric user ID, the operand is used as a user name. The group may be either a numeric group ID or a group name. Similar to the user name, if a group name is also a numeric group ID, the operand is used as a group name. Major and minor device numbers can be given in any format acceptable to strtoul(3), so that a leading '0x' indicates a hexadecimal number, and a leading '0' will cause the number to be interpreted as octal. The mknod utility can be used to recreate deleted device nodes under a devfs(5) mount point by invoking it with only a filename as an argu- ment. Example: mknod /dev/cd0 where /dev/cd0 is the name of the deleted device node. COMPATIBILITY
The chown(8)-like functionality is specific to FreeBSD. As of FreeBSD 4.0, block devices were deprecated in favour of character devices. As of FreeBSD 5.0, device nodes are managed by the device file system devfs(5), making the mknod utility superfluous. As of FreeBSD 6.0 device nodes may be created in regular file systems but such nodes cannot be used to access devices. SEE ALSO
mkfifo(1), mknod(2), devfs(5), chown(8) HISTORY
A mknod utility appeared in Version 6 AT&T UNIX. BSD
January 31, 2010 BSD
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