• hperrin@lemmy.world
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    7 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@lemmy.ml
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      7 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
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        7 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.