Linux Man Pages

Unix Manual Pages Home

Free Linux Documentation

Manual pages sections

Almost all UNIX operating systems have voluminous documentation known as manual pages. Every page is a document. If one wants to read a page then the command man at a shell prompt will show the manual, for example, "man ftp". Pages are referred by using the notation "name(manual-section)", for example time(1).

Man Page :: Unix Man Pages - null

Browse Linux man pages by name. Choose the first letter of the name of the Linux command, function, or file you are interested in:

a|b|c|d|e|f|g|h|i|j|k|l|m|n|o|p|q|r|s|t|u|v|w|x|y|z|_| All

NAME

null, zero - data sink

DESCRIPTION

Data written on a null or zero special file is discarded. Reads from the null special file always return end of file, whereas reads from zero always return e0 characters.

null and zero 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.