NAME

       null, zero - data sink

DESCRIPTION

       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.)

SEE ALSO

       chown(1), mknod(1), full(4)

COLOPHON

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