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NULL(4)                                                                 Linux Programmer's Manual                                                                NULL(4)

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                                                                          2015-07-23                                                                        NULL(4)