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Matthew Ferris
2,981 PointsCommand line - /dev/null
I was playing around on terminal the other day and noticed the /dev/null directory, which I understand is a special directory used for deleting files in Unix. But the file on my system is over 17 gigs. Can I safely delete this file and trust the system to make a "fresh" one upon reboot? Why does it need to take up so much space?
2 Answers
James Barnett
39,199 PointsPost the output of
ls -la /dev/nul && du -g /dev/null
Matthew Ferris
2,981 Pointsthanks james, upon further investigation it was determined that i can't read :P it was actually a file named devnull in my user directory. i have no idea what it is but because of the size i'm thinking it's some weird output from when I was using handbrake to encode a few movie files a long long time ago.
James Barnett
39,199 PointsThat makes much better sense. You probably tried to redirect standard error to /dev/null and instead redirect standard input into a file.