.\" Copyright (c) 1993 Michael Haardt (michael@moria.de), .\" Fri Apr 2 11:32:09 MET DST 1993 .\" .\" SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0-or-later .\" .\" Modified Sat Jul 24 17:00:12 1993 by Rik Faith (faith@cs.unc.edu) .TH null 4 2024-06-15 "Linux man-pages 6.9.1" .SH NAME null, zero \- data sink .SH DESCRIPTION Data written to the .I /dev/null and .I /dev/zero special files is discarded. .P Reads from .I /dev/null always return end of file (i.e., .BR read (2) returns 0), whereas reads from .I /dev/zero always return bytes containing zero (\[aq]\[rs]0\[aq] characters). .P These devices are typically created by: .P .in +4n .EX mknod \-m 666 /dev/null c 1 3 mknod \-m 666 /dev/zero c 1 5 chown root:root /dev/null /dev/zero .EE .in .SH FILES .I /dev/null .br .I /dev/zero .SH NOTES If these devices are not writable and readable for all users, many programs will act strangely. .P Since Linux 2.6.31, .\" commit 2b83868723d090078ac0e2120e06a1cc94dbaef0 reads from .I /dev/zero are interruptible by signals. (This change was made to help with bad latencies for large reads from .IR /dev/zero .) .SH SEE ALSO .BR chown (1), .BR mknod (1), .BR full (4)