1When building a target filesystem, it is desirable to not have to 2become root and then run 'mknod' a thousand times. Using a device 3table you can create device nodes and directories "on the fly". 4 5You can do all sorts of interesting things with a device table file. 6For example, if you want to adjust the permissions on a particular 7file you can just add an entry like: 8 9 /sbin/foobar f 2755 0 0 - - - - - 10 11and (assuming the file /sbin/foobar exists) it will be made setuid 12root (regardless of what its permissions are on the host filesystem. 13 14Furthermore, you can use a single table entry to create a many device 15minors. For example, if I wanted to create /dev/hda and 16/dev/hda[0-15] I could just use the following two table entries: 17 18 /dev/hda b 640 0 0 3 0 0 0 - 19 /dev/hda b 640 0 0 3 1 1 1 15 20 21Device table entries take the form of: 22 23<name> <type> <mode> <uid> <gid> <major> <minor> <start> <inc> <count> 24 25where name is the file name, type can be one of: 26 27 f: A regular file 28 d: Directory 29 c: Character special device file 30 b: Block special device file 31 p: Fifo (named pipe) 32 33uid is the user id for the target file, gid is the group id for the 34target file. The rest of the entries (major, minor, etc) apply only 35to device special files. 36