Sometimes, you will hear the view that Unix’s design is without significant issues, especially the ‘pure’ design of Research Unix (before people who didn’t really understand Unix like Berkeley and corporate AT&T got their hands on it). Unfortunately that is not the case, and there are some areas where Research Unix made decisions that still haunt us to this day. For reasons beyond the scope of this entry, today’s example is that part of the file attributes that you get from stat() system call and its friends is the ‘device number’ of the filesystem the file is on.

I think it’s a bit exaggerated to say this is an issue that haunts us. More like a historical note.