man-pages/man4/null.4.html
2021-03-31 01:06:50 +01:00

112 lines
2.2 KiB
HTML

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD><TITLE>Man page of NULL</TITLE>
</HEAD><BODY>
<H1>NULL</H1>
Section: Linux Programmer's Manual (4)<BR>Updated: 2015-07-23<BR><A HREF="#index">Index</A>
<A HREF="/cgi-bin/man/man2html">Return to Main Contents</A><HR>
<A NAME="lbAB">&nbsp;</A>
<H2>NAME</H2>
null, zero - data sink
<A NAME="lbAC">&nbsp;</A>
<H2>DESCRIPTION</H2>
Data written to the
<I>/dev/null</I>
and
<I>/dev/zero</I>
special files is discarded.
<P>
Reads from
<I>/dev/null</I>
always return end of file (i.e.,
<B><A HREF="/cgi-bin/man/man2html?2+read">read</A></B>(2)
returns 0), whereas reads from
<I>/dev/zero</I>
always return bytes containing zero ('\0' characters).
<P>
These devices are typically created by:
<P>
mknod -m 666 /dev/null c 1 3
mknod -m 666 /dev/zero c 1 5
chown root:root /dev/null /dev/zero
<A NAME="lbAD">&nbsp;</A>
<H2>FILES</H2>
<I>/dev/null</I>
<BR>
<I>/dev/zero</I>
<A NAME="lbAE">&nbsp;</A>
<H2>NOTES</H2>
If these devices are not writable and readable for all users, many
programs will act strangely.
<P>
Since Linux 2.6.31,
reads from
<I>/dev/zero</I>
are interruptible by signals.
(This change was made to help with bad latencies for large reads from
<I>/dev/zero</I>.)
<A NAME="lbAF">&nbsp;</A>
<H2>SEE ALSO</H2>
<B><A HREF="/cgi-bin/man/man2html?1+chown">chown</A></B>(1),
<B><A HREF="/cgi-bin/man/man2html?1+mknod">mknod</A></B>(1),
<B><A HREF="/cgi-bin/man/man2html?4+full">full</A></B>(4)
<A NAME="lbAG">&nbsp;</A>
<H2>COLOPHON</H2>
This page is part of release 5.05 of the Linux
<I>man-pages</I>
project.
A description of the project,
information about reporting bugs,
and the latest version of this page,
can be found at
<A HREF="https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.">https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.</A>
<P>
<HR>
<A NAME="index">&nbsp;</A><H2>Index</H2>
<DL>
<DT id="1"><A HREF="#lbAB">NAME</A><DD>
<DT id="2"><A HREF="#lbAC">DESCRIPTION</A><DD>
<DT id="3"><A HREF="#lbAD">FILES</A><DD>
<DT id="4"><A HREF="#lbAE">NOTES</A><DD>
<DT id="5"><A HREF="#lbAF">SEE ALSO</A><DD>
<DT id="6"><A HREF="#lbAG">COLOPHON</A><DD>
</DL>
<HR>
This document was created by
<A HREF="/cgi-bin/man/man2html">man2html</A>,
using the manual pages.<BR>
Time: 00:06:02 GMT, March 31, 2021
</BODY>
</HTML>