How to get a node from major number

guptarai · 11-13-2007, 05:53 AM

Hi,
There can be multiple devices attached to a system for one type of work(say printer). Every object type has a unique major number as defined in major.h. For every printer there will be a minor number.

Can some body tell me the mechanism how to retrieve the minor numbers for a particular major number and then from that combination(major + minor number) how I can get the device node(We need to pass device node to open a device e.g. dev/node).

I want to know how to use a device for my application.

Thanks in Advance,

Regards,
Ravi

rjlee · 11-13-2007, 07:42 AM

Are you working in kernel space (i.e. writing a kernel module) or user space (a regular program)?

You can get a list of device nodes with major and minor versions easily enough:

Code:

find /dev -type b -exec ls -l {} \; ; find /dev -type c -exec ls -l {} \;

. You should be able to parse that to find both the minor numbers and the corresponding device nodes.

If you know that your device is a block device, you can ignore everything from the second semicolon afterwards, and if it's a character device then you can ignore from the start to the second semicolon.

Hope that helps,

—Robert J Lee