I'm cross-posting this from the Garbage Collector, but:

Few months ago, I learnt that Unix and Linux do I/O by exposing devices in /dev, but what the heck about Windows?

I imagine it's not very much different although the terminology is very different. In *nix everything is a "file" where in windows they are called "objects"

Are those "objects" exposed in the filesystem?

They are typically accessed through the "device manager" but they do have a path like \\COM1

Oh.

Windows has an I/O manager that redirects requests to the appropriate driver which is something the kernel handles in *nix

@jesse_b Everything (for some definition of "everything") is associated with a pathname. But everything isn't necessarily a file.

Today I learned that about /proc/sys/fs/protected_*

@ChrisDavies weird that it's a kernel level thing

It's another of the security settings that's passed me by. There's one relating to symlinks too - something like not being allowed to symlink a file that you don't own, or something

Huh

That seems really, really weird.