file: module and character special files

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

I'm running Erlang/OTP R9C on a SunBlade 100 running Solaris 2.9.
I wanted to test some file I/O code I had written, and for obvious
reasons used /dev/null as a test file.  The results were surprising
and the cause disappointing (to put it politely).

Erlang (BEAM) emulator version 5.3 [source] [hipe] [threads:0]

Eshell V5.3  (abort with ^G)
1> file:open('/dev/null', [read]).
{error,eisdir}
2> file:open('/dev/null', [write]).
{error,eisdir}

/dev/null is a perfectly good file.  It is not a directory.

In Solaris 2.9, /dev/null is a symbolic link to this
character special file:

crw-rw-rw-   1 root     sys       13,  2 Jan 29 15:44 /devices/pseudo/mm@REDACTED:null

As you see, on my system there are no file permission reasons why
this important and useful file should be forbidden to Erlang code.

3> file:open('/dev/tty', [read]).
{error,eisdir}
4> file:open('/dev/tty', [write]).
{error,eisdir}

Poking around a bit more, I find that opening _any_
character special file seems to be forbidden.
I don't mind not being able to seek on these things,
but surely I don't have to be able to seek in order to
just plain read and write?

PS:  I can't find documentation for inets/src/http.erl.
Where should I be looking?