What does /dev/null mean in a shell script?
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rishiag
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Published on 2014-08-22T17:18:25Z
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2014/08/23
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I've started learning bash scripting by using this guide: http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/abs-guide.pdf
However I got stuck at the first script:
cd /var/log
cat /dev/null > messages
cat /dev/null > wtmp
echo "Log files cleaned up."
What do lines 2 and 3 do in Ubuntu (I understand cat
)? Is it only for other Linux distributions? After running this script as root, the output I get is Log files cleaned up.
But /var/log
still contains all the files.
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