| Type of File | Character | Description |
|---|
| Regular files | - | Regular files are one-dimensional arrays of bytes. |
| Directories | d | Directories are containers for files and other directories. |
| Symbolic links | l | Symbolic links are files that contain the name of another file or a directory. |
| Character devices | c | Character devices enable communication between hardware and IRIX; data is accessed on a character by character basis. |
| Block devices | b | Block devices enable communication between hardware and IRIX; data is accessed in blocks from a system buffer cache. |
| Named pipes (also known as FIFOs) | p | Named pipes allow communication between two unrelated processes running on the same host. They are created with the mknod command (see the section "Creating Device Files With mknod" in Chapter 2 for more information on mknod). |
| UNIX domain sockets | s | UNIX domain sockets are connections between processes that allow them to communicate, possibly over a network. |