/dev/null

• The entry /dev/null, the null device, is very handy. It serves two purposes;
  • Linux discards any data written to /dev/null. Specify /dev/null as an output file in some context where the output is unwanted.

    $ verbose_command > /dev/null
    

  • Reading from /dev/null always results in an end-of-file. For instance, if you open a file descriptor to /dev/null using open and then attempt to read from the file descriptor, read will read no bytes and will return 0.

    $ cp /dev/null empty-file
    $ ls -l empty-file