Thanks to everyone that replied pointing out that it was /dev/null that
I needed NOT /dev/zero.
Thanks again
Don Sharp
"Peter J. Acklam" wrote:
>
> Don Sharp <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> >I carried out the following sequence of commands
> >
> >$ for i in `cat /tmp/d`; do if [ -f $i.idx ]; then ls -l ${i}*; fi; done
> >-rw-r--r-- 1 don None 0 Jun 17 1998 dtaq
> >-rw-r--r-- 1 don None 3072 Jun 17 1998 dtaq.idx
> >$ cp /dev/zero dtaq.idx
> >
> >The cp appeared to be hanging and the disc was rattling away, so in
> >another window I typed in
> >
> >$ ls -l dtaq*
> >-rw-r--r-- 1 don None 0 Jun 17 1998 dtaq
> >-rw-r--r-- 1 don None 65307648 Jun 17 1998 dtaq.idx
> >
> >and you can see that the reported size of the target of the 'cp
> >/dev/zero' has grown to a considerable size in a short time.
> >
> >Can anyone else reproduce this?
>
> Hopefull, everyone can reproduce this. I think you are mixing
> /dev/zero with /dev/null. /dev/zero will always return a buffer
> full of zeros (that is NULs, not the digit or letter zero).
> /dev/zero has infinite length, so copying from it with "cp" to
> a regular file will always cause you do run out of disk space.
>
> Peter
>
> --
> Peter J. Acklam - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://home.online.no/~pjacklam
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