2004/01/22 ioctl

These are the methods that device drivers provide for functions that can't be accomplished through normal i/o. For example, a tape driver will have an ioctl call to set compression. See http://aplawrence.com/Unix/lpstatus.html for more examples.

On more modern systems, these are deprecated and replaced with things like Linux /proc and (2.6) /sys pseudo filesystems.

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