Does a Linux block special file have a corresponding character special file Simple codger question from the days of UNIX... Does Linux have character special files which correspond directly to a block special file? Back in my day each disk in UNIX had both a block special and a character special file. Also, these special files were permanent inodes in the root file system. I don't see anything like that; most of `/dev` seems to be automatically generated as a virtual file system and I see nothing like `/dev/rsda1` that would correspond to my root file system (vg) `/dev/sda5`. Has Linux eliminated the block/character pairs completely? Please excuse if this is a dumb question!

No, Linux doesn't have (and AFAIK never had) those block/char pairs.

If you want to do "raw" i/o (bypass the block buffer cache) you should either open the device with `O_DIRECT` or explicitly attach a raw device to it.