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)

Linux man-pages 6.15                               2025-05-17                                            null(4)