Re: [SLUG] Quick Unixy Q.

[James Morris <jmorris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 23 Nov 2000, Jeff Waugh wrote:

> 'tag,
> 
> Here's a quick one... What is /dev/zero used for, and what are a few good
> examples?
> 
> I was just crashing Mozilla the other day (file:///dev/zero), and thought I
> could do with this gap in my knowledge filled.
> 

man 4 zero

As mentioned, it's a source of null bytes.

One example of usage is to allocate page-aligned memory by mmap()ing
/dev/zero (see http://www.intercode.com.au/jmorris/rawutil/), instead of
using the deprecated valloc() function.

- James
--
James Morris
<jmorris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>