|
|
|
|
|
|
by zeroimpl
1247 days ago
|
|
|
I dunno, if you “echo foo > /dev/null” then “cat /dev/null” you won’t get foo back. Plenty of assumptions about filesystem behaviour don’t work in all cases. That being said, I’d prefer if the symlink actually worked and sent the packet. |
|
|
I will quibble with you on /dev/null a little bit. /dev/null works like any other file; there is absolutely no guarantee that you can read what you wrote on any filesystem write on UNIX. You can "echo foo > regular_file" and then "cat regular_file" and it could be gone or have completely different content. Other processes writing the file, network filesystems, quantum rays, who knows. So to me, /dev/null is not unusual in that respect at all, except that that probability function that you can read what you wrote looks a little different than a regular file.
Most importantly, /dev/null isn't a construction implemented by bash. Any program on the OS sees the same behavior as your shell script. That said, this isn't really as unusual as I originally thought. You can open a file named $HOME/foo in bash and that's going to be a very different file in your C program. I do like the $ to indicate "hey this is a quirk of the programming language that's allowing this", though.