5. Special Files: Character Mode and Block (Web servers) Mode
5. Special Files: Character Mode and Block Mode Files /proc/3/ /proc/4/ /proc/5/ [1]+ Done ls -F –show-control-chars –color=auto -d . /proc/[0-9] >a_pipe $ Similarly, reads are also blocking. If we execute the above commands in the reverse order, we will see that head blocks, waiting for some process to give it something to read: $ head -5