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Jon Haslam
Software Engineer
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Snooping /dev/null

· 4 min read
Jon Haslam
Software Engineer

Ever wondered what gets written into the big global bit bucket, /dev/null? No? On busy, active systems it is not only interesting to see what is writen to this file but it may actually be extremely useful for debugging and troubleshooting. This is simply because developers frequently redirect stderr to /dev/null either in applications or in scripts and, while this may be the correct thing to do most of the time, it can sometimes obscure interesting runtime behaviour.