On Wednesday 14 July 2004 10:23, Jim Higson wrote: > 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? Oh, and also see this: http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Blanking_a_hard_drive You can use yes to repeat anything, and pipe it to dd.
