Robert McKay - bash: /dev/null: No such file or directory. Why is /dev/null implemented This is the mail archive of the cygwin mailing list for the. Index Nav: [] [] [] [] Message Nav: [] [] [] [] Other format: [] bash: /dev/null: No such file or directory. Why is /dev/null implemented using the windows NUL device? • From: 'Robert McKay' • To: cygwin at cygwin dot com • Date: Thu, 1 Jun 2006 10:57:30 +0100 • Subject: bash: /dev/null: No such file or directory. Why is /dev/null implemented using the windows NUL device?

What is the DOS equivalent of 1>/dev/null? How can you echo a newline in batch files? Copy of /dev/null has different behaviours depending on location. Oct 20, 2009 Copy files to /dev/null. Command doesn't find files in alphabetical order so it is difficult to identify what the next file it was copying would be. Vga Driver Windows 98 Virtualbox.

I've got rather an annoying/frustrating problem with cygwin 2.510.2.2 on WinXP [Version 5.1.2600]. It was working fine last friday but over the weekend gremlins have broken my /dev/null.

You misread the advice, the idea is not to copy the large file to /dev/null, which wouldn't affect it in any way, outside putting it in cache if space is available. Cp bigfile /dev/null # useless The advice is not to remove the file then copy /dev/null to it, as it would keep the original inode unchanged and won't free any disk space as long as processes have that file open. The advice is to replace the file content with /dev/null one, which, given the fact /dev/null size is zero by design, is effectively truncating the file to zero bytes: cp /dev/null bigfile # works cat /dev/null >bigfile # works It might be noted that if you use a shell to run these commands, there is no need to use /dev/null, a simple empty redirection will have the same effect and would be more efficient, cat /dev/null being a no-op anyway.: >bigfile # better >bigfile # even better if the shell used supports it. Short answer is no, it doesn't work. There are many flavour of unix abroad, may be for some this might work, can you provide a link?

Now, you can test it: • open two terminal in your system. • copy to non root user a large file (like /var/log/messages ) • vi it ( vi messages ) in first terminal. • cp messages /dev/null on other. • quit vi on first. Messages should still be there. (vi is not a good candidate, if you remove file, ( rm messages) file will be removed (at least on ubuntu 16.04), you can rewrite it from vi (using w but file will be read from.messages.swp on current dir).