Re: Need blocking /dev/null

Ville Herva
2001-10-31T09:23:01Z

On Wed, Oct 31, 2001 at 12:51:29AM +0000, you [Riley Williams] claimed:
> Hi Marko.
>
> > PS Are /dev/null and /dev/zero also redundant?
>
> I regularly use both...
>
> 1. Find a download that doesn't appear where one expected it...
>
> find / -name "wanted-but-lost-download" 2> /dev/null
>
> 2. Create a loop-mounted partition to populate as a CD image before
> burning the CD in question.
>
> dd if=/dev/zero bs=1048576 count=750 of=/tmp/cd.img
> mke2fs /tmp/cd.img
> mount -o loop /tmp/cd.img /img/cd
>
> 3. Create a loop-mounted partition to populate as a floppy image.
>
> dd if=/dev/zero bs=1024 count=1440 of=/tmp/floppy.img
> mke2fs /tmp/floppy.img
> mount -o loop /tmp/floppy.img /img/floppy
>
> Neither has alternatives that make sense as far as I can see.

Certainly have in the sense that you could theoretically do that in user
space.

find / -name "wanted-but-lost-download" | eat
zerofill | head -c 1440k > /tmp/floppy.img
ssh foo@bar | block

etc.

(Implementation of eat, block and zerofill is left as an exercise...)

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