Csdrhrt

What inspired this question is that I am testing the functionality of watchdog device and I was thinking if there is a shell inbuilt command to just open the device and do nothing/wait until terminated?
Echo/touch seem to just open and close the device immediately after performing the operation. Cat does not seem to work.

I am using a C application to do the same but was wondering if shell script has some provision for it

In Bourne-like shells,

exec 3< "$device"

Opens the device on file descriptor 3 of the shell.

That would be more or less equivalent to C's:

fd = open(device, O_RDONLY);

if (fd < 0) handler_error(...);

if (fd != 3) { dup2(fd, 3); close(fd); }

(ksh93 also does a fcntl(3, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC) on that fd).

To close it: exec 3<&-

In zsh, ksh93 and bash, the equivalent of fd = open(device, O_RDONLY) could also be written as:

exec {fd}< "$device"

Where the file descriptor would be the first free one above 9 and stored in $fd.

To close it: exec {fd}<&-

Replace < with > for O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_TRUNC, and with <> for O_RDWR|O_CREAT and >> for O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_APPEND.

zsh also has a sysopen builtin (in the zsh/system module) where you can specify the flags exactly.

Note that in POSIX compliant shells, exec being a special builtin, if the file can't be opened, it's a fatal error when non-interactive (it exits the script). You can disabled that by using the command command.

if command exec 3< "$device"; then

  do-what-you-need-to-do

else

  handle-the-error-yourself

fi

while sleep 3600; do :; done >/dev/your_watchdog

I gather (from the echo and touch working and the cat failing) that the device should be open in write only mode.