Reserving Space on Disk

[Keith Gabryelski]

In article <13212 at mcdphx.phx.mcd.mot.com> fnf at riscokid.UUCP (Fred Fish) writes:
>[...], I've always wondered why there wasn't a /dev/full as a
>standard part of unix.  It's the obvious counterpart of /dev/null, and
>simply returns as many null bytes as you ask for.  Then all you would
>have to do is:
>
>	dd if=/dev/full of=myfile bs=1k count=4k

On some of the latest forms of Unix (SVR4 which inherited it from
SunOS) there is a /dev/zero which does this.  It is used for mmap()ing
in the bss segment and ignoring null pointer problems :-).

Pax, Keith