/dev/zero

Not to be confused with Null device.

/dev/zero is a special file in Unix-like operating systems that provides as many null characters (ASCII NUL, 0x00) as are read from it.[1] One of the typical uses is to provide a character stream for initializing data storage.[2]

  1. ^ Mitchell, Mark; Oldham, Jeffrey; Samuel, Alex (2001), "6.5.2 /dev/zero", Advanced Linux Programming, Sams Publishing, p. 136, ISBN 9780735710436
  2. ^ Love, Robert (2007), "Mapping /dev/zero", Linux System Programming: Talking Directly to the Kernel and C Library, O'Reilly Media, Inc., pp. 259–260, ISBN 9780596009588