/dev/null sez nothing is also a file

Unfortunately, no one can be told what a file is. You have to see it for yourself.

This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the file system goes.

true enlightenment: everything is a string over an IO socket

You'll know you've reached stage 6 when you seriously start considering running Plan 9 as a daily driver

Am I a file?

"How can files be real if the filesystem isn't real?" - Jaden Smith (probably)

7. Everything is a FIFO

Files? In my Linux?

It's more likely than you think.

Okay, but what are blocks then? A file is really just a bunch of blocked stacked together with the inode metadata also sitting on another block, so is everything just blocks or because you can emulate a block device on a filesystem, are blocks themselves files? If that last part is true then files are infinitely recursive and my head is starting to spin.

Missing stage 7: Not everything is a file.

Linux is closer than other *nixes (sysctl equivalents in some platforms are not files, but they are files in Linux).

However get very far into network and the file-like behaviors become more limited. From an application, at least you have a decent chance of having unseekable, but otherwise 'file-like' interaction with stream protocols. Then you need recvmsg/sendmsg. Then you want to deal with low level interaction with the network stack and dealing with NETLINK and such..

Exactly. A file is really just a way to understand a collection of bits. So saying everything is files is like saying everything in computers can be described as sets of bits, which is not a terrible heuristic.

Files don't actually exist once you dig down

Everything is computer.

tldr: it's to have nicer, less complicated I/O operations

it enables just having two API calls: read() and write() to do everything

Can confirm; user is file too

Generally speaking, a handle is an opaque reference to an os object; the typedef here makes that clear. Linux uses the same general concept as well, though file objects are typically referenced through file descriptors rather than windows style handles.

What's this "back far enough" shit, I've used punch cards and punch tape.

Fuck me I'm old.

You could argue that a collection of punch cards is a file

Aren't directories just files that say "hey i am directory ABCD and file X, Y and Z are my childs"?