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tail -c anyvalue /dev/zero
that doesn't loop forever is a bug as it's meant to output the end of an infinite stream./dev/zero
isn't too bad, which ever way it goes. Actually, I could argue that the fact that/dev/zero
supports seeking from the end is already wrong, since conceptually it doesn't have an end. And if the OS provides functions that are wrong, it's not the fault of the utility. :)proc
which look like regular files but where the size is a complete lie. Except that the seek(fd, -N, SEEK_END); read(N) should still be as valid as it can be./dev/zero
, and it looks to always return a new position of zero, but with SEEK_END, the caller can't really know what the position should be anyway. But it could just drop an ESPIPE, same as/dev/tty
appears to do./dev/zero
specifically, it might as well be considered as an infinite tape (Turing style), where every value is always zero, so position is meaningless.