/dev/zero
Sign in to saveis a special file in Unix-like operating systems that provides as many null characters (ASCII NUL, 0x00) as are read from it. One of the typical uses is to provide a character stream for initializing data storage.
Wikidata facts
- Instance of
- device file
- Part of
- Unix-like operating system
- Has use
- data stream
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- different from
- /dev/null
via Wikidata · CC0
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Encyclopedic overview
5 sectionsContents
- Function
- History
- Examples
- See also
- References
is a special file in Unix-like operating systems that provides as many null characters (ASCII NUL, 0x00) as are read from it. One of the typical uses is to provide a character stream for initializing data storage.
==Function== Read operations from return as many null characters (0x00) as requested in the read operation.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “/dev/zero” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.