cat >/dev/null_

I found a link to this site sitting in a post from a spanish guy’s blog.

I can’t read Spanish or whatever that is (it doesn’t look like Spanish to both Babelfish and myself), but it looks like David is amazed by the fact that so many sites have /dev/null in their name (his site’s name being “/home/daf”, clearly another unixism).

This provides the pretext for a couple of observations:

• I’m quite sure that the “blogging” section of my site was the first one to have such name. I remember doing some research before using it. Obviously I can’t be hundred percent sure, but as the Wayback Machine can testify, it was called like that long before blogs were trendy (or even existed at all, at least in their current incarnation: they were called “home pages”, however uncool that may sound today). Previous names were “word from the sage” and “the bytebucket”.
• The name of this blog is “cat >/dev/null”, which is more than just a reference to the null device. It is a valid un*x shell command that has the effect of sending everything you type directly to the null device. That is a metaphor for me writing stuff no-one is actually going to read. The blog’s tagline, “world’s first write-only blog”, is even clearer in that respect. Sad as it is, that’s more or less what happens.

What does this mean, why did I write this… of course to state my case that I’m cooler than any other /dev/null around, with the possible exception of Ken Thompson‘s. Flames to /dev/null.