zero4
Data sink
Part of null(4).
Overview
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
Files
/dev/null
/dev/zero
Notes
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.)
Releases
19 releases since Debian 1.1 (Buzz); the text changed 15 times.