/dev/zero

[FoulDragon at aol.com]

In a message dated 2/19/2006 11:31:34 AM US Mountain Standard Time, 
dwchandler at stilyagin.com writes:
>These things won't be any use to you as a user. As a developer, sys 
>admin, etc., it can be handy to have a device give you an endless stream 
>of data. For network there's the chargen service.

They're also very useful for political parties.  Where else needs an endless 
stream of zeros more?

Seriously, it can be useful to create a "empty file" of a given size.

dd if=/dev/zero of=filename bs=1 count=size.

or to wipe out all data on something... not really a secure delete, but if 
you want to hose all the logical information, like if you have a completely 
mangled partition table

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdb

might work