Jim Higson wrote:
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.
Physics experiment.
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
Oops, should be 'shred'.
That might work.
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?
Binary ones.
Thanks a bunch,
William
