Re: /dev/null > /dev/sdb1 !
On 2008-04-22 18:13 +0200, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
> On 22/04/2008, Sven Joachim <svenjoac@gmx.de> wrote:
>> No, you would only zero out the disk if you cat /dev/zero to it.
>> Catting /dev/null immediately returns and does nothing.
>
> Hm at least catting /dev/null to a full file makes the file now be 0
> bytes long.
That's because the shell opens the file with the O_TRUNC flag. If you
try the same with a device file, nothing happens because O_TRUNC is
ignored then. See open(2).
> I'm not going to test what it does to my hard drive, of
> course. ;-)
If you still have a floppy drive, you can test with that, this is what I
did.
Sven
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