What are /dev/zero and /dev/null files ?
"/dev/zero" and "/dev/null" are two dummy devices files which are useful for creating empty files. "/dev/zero": It is used to create a file with no data but with required size(A file with all zero’s written on it). Let's create file with /dev/zero [root@localhost ~]# dd if=/dev/zero of=/opt/zero.txt bs=2048 count=2048 2048+0 records in 2048+0 records out 4194304 bytes (4.2 MB) copied, 0.150465 s, 27.9 MB/s it creates a file that has continuous zeros in it. So we can say that /dev/zero is a file which is used to create a new file with some required size without any meaning to the data. "/dev/null": This file is useful in cases like redirecting unwanted output/error etc to this file. Actually it acts as a black hole which absorbs this unwanted input. So whenever you feed some data to this file, you can not retrieve the data which is fed to it. This file even useful for creating files with zero size. e.g. If you see i h...