Manual pages › Devices and drivers (7)
zero(7)
source of zeroes
From the original Amiga UNIX 2.1 manual. Some things it mentions may not be in this release.
NAME
zero - source of zeroes
DESCRIPTION
A zero special file is a source of zeroed unnamed memory. Reads from a zero special file always return a buffer full of zeroes. The file is of infinite length. Writes to a zero special file are always successful, but the data written is ignored. Mapping a zero special file creates a zero-initialized unnamed memory object of a length equal to the length of the mapping and rounded up to the nearest page size as returned by sysconf. Multiple processes can share such a zero special file object provided a common ancestor mapped the object MAP_SHARED.
FILES
/dev/zero
SEE ALSO
fork(2), sysconf(3C), mmap(2)