Weekend trivia: your process' memory is a file

Some folks say that the design philosophy of Unix is that “everything is a file”. If you’re familiar with Unix-like platforms, you probably know that they don’t quite live up to the hype. It’s true that these systems allow convenient access to hardware through file-like objects in directories such as /sys or /dev. At the same time, there’s plenty of OS functionality that isn’t exposed via files; for example, you can’t connect to a remote webserver without using a dedicated system call.This is something people would probably have liked to do! A popular shell called bash comes with a workaround: it special-cases certain file paths, letting you construct the following shell monstrosity:$ (echo -e 'GET / HTTP/1.0\nHost: coredump.cx\n' 1>&0; cat) </dev/tcp/coredump.cx/80 HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently Date: Mon, 01 Jun 2026 01:07:22 GMT Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 Connection: close Location: https://coredump.cx/ ...That said, the /dev/tcp/<server>/<port> trick works only for the…