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Comment by SixSigma | Hacker News Reader

Plan9's

    cat /dev/screen  > /home/sixs/screenshot

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Wouldn't that dump the screen in raw format though?

If so, you can do something similar if you have a framebuffer interface on linux by doing "cat /dev/fb0 > /wherever" although admittedly it'll dump all the buffers if you're multi-buffering.

As a plan9 image formatted file. The poster below introduces topng but there is slso togif and others.

But that just muddies the waters, You could email the file to another plan9 user, plan9 tools can work with it, display it etc

I guess you would do something like: cat /dev/screen | pngenc > foo.png

Actually it would be:

  topng < /dev/screen > foo.png

Wow. That's kinda awesome. I don't even see /dev/audio on Ubuntu now. I wonder if Plan9 is actually usable right now or is it only suited to talking about how operating systems could be?

What is your definition of "usable"? It's certainly stable.

I wonder how that worked for multi-user or multi-screen setups?

The filesystem in plan9 allows per-process namespaces.

The nearest linux equivalent is probably "xwd".

What if the screen updates at the same time? Does plan9 give any atomic guarantees?

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