Mail Archives: cygwin/2006/06/01/05:57:49
I've got rather an annoying/frustrating problem with cygwin 2.510.2.2
on WinXP [Version 5.1.2600]. It was working fine last friday but over
the weekend gremlins have broken my /dev/null.
$ echo > /dev/null
bash: /dev/null: No such file or directory
$ ls -l /dev/null
crw-rw-rw- 1 mckayr1 mkpasswd 1, 3 Jun 1 10:35 /dev/null
$ rm /dev/null
rm: cannot remove `/dev/null': No such file or directory
$ mknod /dev/null c 1 3
mknod: `/dev/null': File exists
$ mknod /tmp/null c 1 3
$ ls -l /tmp/null
crw-rw-rw- 1 mckayr1 mkpasswd 1, 3 Jun 1 10:36 /tmp/null
$ echo > /tmp/null
bash: /tmp/null: No such file or directory
$ echo > /dev/zero
$
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=file count=10
10+0 records in
10+0 records out
5120 bytes (5.1 kB) copied, 0.02 seconds, 256 kB/s
$ ls -l file
-rw-rw-rw- 1 mckayr1 mkpasswd 5120 Jun 1 10:39 file
I found a few similar references to this issue in the mailing list
archives, however there it was happening to people running on embedded
windows.
Then I found this post:
http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2003-10/msg01017.html
which shed some light on what might be the issue. Cygwin /dev/null is
implemented on top of the windows NUL device. Sure enough when I try
this from cmd.exe :
Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]
(C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp.
C:\>dir > NUL
The system cannot find the file specified.
C:\>
Now I can't say for sure that this was working on friday, but I got a
few other people to try the same thing and they don't get that "The
system cannot find the file specified" message (ie: for them it works
as you would expect):
C:\>dir > NUL
C:\>
I don't have any idea why or how my NUL device has stopped working so
I suppose my first question to the list is somewhat offtopic :
Does anyone know what can go wrong with the windows NUL device? :-)
Do you need any kind of special permissions to use NUL?
I've tried rebooting, logging out logging back in, re-installing
cygwin many times but still no joy.
I guess my next question is.. how hard would it be to simply replace
the cygwin /dev/null with one that doesn't use the NUL device? If I
could remove the /dev/null device and replace it with a second
/dev/zero device that would probably fix 99% of my problems as most
things are only trying to write to /dev/null, not read from it. If I
could write my own /dev/null device that just implemented a couple of
do-nothing read/write syscalls without using the windows NUL service
that would be even better.
Any suggestions appreciated,
Sincerely,
Robert McKay.
--
Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html
Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/
- Raw text -