• AMDIsOurLord
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      5
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      8 months ago

      /dev/null is nothing, empty void. If you move something there it just gets deleted

      • hperrin@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        9
        ·
        edit-2
        8 months ago

        You can’t move anything there, it’s a “character special file” that can’t be deleted. If you pipe something there, it does nothing. (As opposed to something like /dev/stdin, that prints what you pipe to it on stdin.) Character special files act kind of like named pipes, except they’re handled by the kernel on one side. They’re raw device files.

        • AMDIsOurLord
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          arrow-down
          5
          ·
          8 months ago

          It’s a “null drive”. Anything that goes in is just simply discarded and a EOF is sent in return. If you “move” a file there, it just gets discarded

          • hperrin@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            13
            ·
            edit-2
            8 months ago

            Just try it. I’m literally telling you the truth. It is not a drive, and you cannot move files to it. It doesn’t have a file system, and you can’t create one on it. It cannot be mounted like a drive. Drives are block special files, and /dev/null is a character special file, not a block special file.

            • AMDIsOurLord
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              5
              ·
              8 months ago

              I see, you’re right, you can’t mv into it, but you can shove streams of data to it

  • Count Regal Inkwell@pawb.social
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    8 months ago

    The conversation in this thread reminded me of a thing I saw on Reddit ages ago, of feeding /dev/random into aplay with some parameters I unfortunately forgot, to get a series of random noise that sounds almost musical.

    Without the parameters you just get white noise sadly.