USB doc patch 2

A little more detail on how and when to poll() /proc/bus/usb/devices.

Signed-off-by: Sam Bishop <sam@bishop.dhs.org>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>

diff --git a/Documentation/DocBook/usb.tmpl b/Documentation/DocBook/usb.tmpl
index 8a28f76..3608472 100644 (file)
--- a/Documentation/DocBook/usb.tmpl
+++ b/Documentation/DocBook/usb.tmpl
@@ -453,14 +453,25 @@
            file in your Linux kernel sources.
            </para>
 
-           <para>Otherwise the main use for this file from programs
-           is to poll() it to get notifications of usb devices
-           as they're plugged or unplugged.
-           To see what changed, you'd need to read the file and
-           compare "before" and "after" contents, scan the filesystem,
-           or see its hotplug event.
+           <para>This file, in combination with the poll() system call, can
+           also be used to detect when devices are added or removed:
+<programlisting>int fd;
+struct pollfd pfd;
+
+fd = open("/proc/bus/usb/devices", O_RDONLY);
+pfd = { fd, POLLIN, 0 };
+for (;;) {
+       /* The first time through, this call will return immediately. */
+       poll(&amp;pfd, 1, -1);
+
+       /* To see what's changed, compare the file's previous and current
+          contents or scan the filesystem.  (Scanning is more precise.) */
+}</programlisting>
+           Note that this behavior is intended to be used for informational
+           and debug purposes.  It would be more appropriate to use programs
+           such as udev or HAL to initialize a device or start a user-mode
+           helper program, for instance.
            </para>
-
        </sect1>
 
        <sect1>