Character Device Vs. Block Device

• A Character ('c') Device is one with which the Driver communicates by sending and receiving single characters (bytes, octets).
• A Block ('b') Device is one with which the Driver communicates by sending entire blocks of data.
• Examples for Character Devices: serial ports, parallel ports, sounds cards.
• Examples for Block Devices: hard disks, USB cameras, Disk-On-Key.
• For the user, the type of the Device (block or character) does not matter - you just care that this is a hard disk partition or a sound card.
• Driver programmers, however, do care, but that's beyond our scope.

Originally written by guy keren