Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2011 14:11:12 +0000
From: Alexander Best <arundel@freebsd.org>
To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Subject: seeking into /dev/{null,zero}
Message-ID: <20110222141112.GA98964@freebsd.org>
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hi there, there's a PR [1] regarding seeking into /dev/null and /dev/zero. i just wanted to ask what the overall opinion is on this matter. technically it's quite easy to seek into those files upon fwrite(3) and fread(3). the point is, if the file position should be repositioned according the the amount of bytes read or written. the zero(4) and null(4) manual pages claim that both devices act as "ordinary" files. right now only reading from /dev/zero will seek into the file. writing to /dev/zero and reading/writing to /dev/null will *not* adjust the file position. cheers. alex [1] http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=misc/152485 ps: i might also be worth thinking about turning null(4) and zero(4) into a single manual page, since their contents seem quite similar. -- a13x
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