From: "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...>
Date: 2003-09-19T01:54:59+09:00
Subject: Re: closing stderr

On Thu, Sep 18, 2003 at 05:28:31PM +0100, Alan Davies wrote:
> Not sure if NUL works on linix/unix

Definitely not.  It will just create a file in the current directory
named "NUL". :)

There are no magic filenames on *N?X.  There are, however, special
files which refer to hardware devices rather than disk storage.  These
can be named anything, since it's not the name that matters but
the file attributes, but there is a standard set of such files
in /dev on all systems.  One of these is /dev/null, which points
to the "null device", which is not a real piece of hardware but a
virtual device that just discards everything written to it.
Another popular virtual device is /dev/zero, which will happily output
zero bytes as long as you care to continue reading from it.

In any case, we came up with much the same solution, differing only
in the filenames for the null device.  The StringIO solution
seems like a better choice for cross-platform compatibility, however.

-Mark