On Fri, Feb 08, 2019 at 02:26:17PM -0500, Randall S. Becker wrote: > > > For this, we could use truncate -s count file instead of dd to get a > > > fixed size file of nulls. This would remove the need for /dev/zero in > > > t5318 (the patch below probably will wrap badly in my mailer so I can > > > submit a real patch separately. > > > > I don't think "truncate" is portable, though. > > It is available AFAIK on Linux, POSIX, and Windows under Cygwin. > That's more than /dev/zero has anyway. I have the patch ready if you > want it. Is it POSIX? Certainly truncate() is, but I didn't think the command-line tool was. If it really is available everywhere, then yeah, I'd be fine with it. > > > > Other cases don't seem to actually care that they're getting NULs, > > > > and are just redirecting stdin from /dev/zero to get an infinite > > > > amount of input. They could probably use "yes" for that. > > > > > > What about reading from /dev/null? > > > > That would yield zero bytes, not an infinite number of them. > > So something like: yes | tr 'y' '\0' | stuff? Exactly (if we even care about them being NULs; otherwise, we can omit the "tr" invocation). -Peff
