null, zero - data sink
Data written to the
/dev/null and
/dev/zero special files is
discarded.
Reads from
/dev/null always return end of file (i.e.,
read(2)
returns 0), whereas reads from
/dev/zero always return bytes containing
zero ('\0' characters).
These devices are typically created by:
mknod -m 666 /dev/null c 1 3
mknod -m 666 /dev/zero c 1 5
chown root:root /dev/null /dev/zero
/dev/null
/dev/zero
If these devices are not writable and readable for all users, many programs will
act strangely.
Since Linux 2.6.31, reads from
/dev/zero are interruptible by signals.
(This change was made to help with bad latencies for large reads from
/dev/zero.)
chown(1),
mknod(1),
full(4)