On Wednesday 14 July 2004 05:34, William M. Quarles wrote: > Jim Higson wrote: > > On Wednesday 14 July 2004 00:02, William M. Quarles wrote: > >>Okay, so there is a /dev/zero. Shouldn't there be a /dev/one, too? Is > >>there any way that I can fill a file or device full of ones? > > > > Btw, why do you want this? > > I guess that I should have said that from the beginning, so that I > wouldn't have to write this as frequently. > > I'm trying to fill a hard drive with all ones. I know how to fill it > with all zeros: Well, yes - I got that bit. Actually, what I really wanted to know is why you would want to do that. If I knew why I could advise. For example if you are trying to securely erase the contents of the drive there's a program called shread, in the GNU coreutils (so you *will* have it!) try: man shread or just go ahead: shread /dev/hda What do you mean by "all ones" - all binary ones (which is filling it with byte 255) or ones on the byte or word level? > dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdb bs=1024 count=58615704 > > I don't know how to fill it with all ones. > > I'm working within pretty low functionality on this system (RHL 9 > installation CD rescue mode). > > Thanks, > William
