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Manual Reference Pages  - NULL (4)

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null, zero - data sink

CONTENTS

Description
Notes
Files

Data written on a null or zero special file is discarded.

Reads from the null special file always return end of file, whereas reads from zero always return \0 characters.

null and zero 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

If these devices are not writable and readable for all users, many programs will act strangely.

/dev/null
/dev/zero

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