NAME
mknod
—
build special file
SYNOPSIS
mknod |
name |
mknod |
name [b |
c ] major minor
[owner:group] |
DESCRIPTION
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 typec
. - 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
argument. 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
HISTORY
A mknod
utility appeared in
Version 4 AT&T UNIX.