On February 8, 2019 14:15, Jeff King wrote: > On Fri, Feb 08, 2019 at 01:47:04PM -0500, Randall S. Becker wrote: > > > > Though I suspect we may be able to just find a solution that works > > > everywhere, without having two different implementations. If we know > > > we need $count bytes for dd, we could probably just generate a file > > > with that many NULs in it. > > > > 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. > > > 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?
