The Universe of Discourse

There is a Unix error device

Yesterday I discussed /dev/full and asked why there wasn't a generalization of it, and laid out out some very 1990s suggestions that I have had in the back of my mind since the 1990s. I ended by acknowledging that there was probably a more modern solution in user space:

Eh, probably the right solution these days is to LD_PRELOAD a complete mock filesystem library that has any hooks you want in it.

Carl Witty suggested that there is a more modern solution in userspace, FUSE, and Leah Neukirchen filled in the details:

UnreliableFS is a FUSE-based fault injection filesystem that allows to change fault-injections in runtime using simple configuration file.

Also, Dave Vasilevsky suggested that something like this could be done with the device mapper.

I think the real takeaway from this is that I had not accepted the hard truth that all Unix is Linux now, and non-Linux Unix is dead.

Thanks everyone who sent suggestions.

[ Addendum: Leah Neukirchen informs me that FUSE also runs on FreeBSD, OpenBSD and macOS, and reminds me that there are a great many MacOS systems. I should face the hard truth that my knowledge of Unix systems capabilities is at least fifteen yers out of date. ]

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