> /dev/null is a special device file, normally called the "bit bucket".
>Anything you send into it is ignored. The main use is to redirect output to
>it if you don't want to it or send stderr there for the equivilant of a -quiet
>option on nasty programs that don't have one.

Most systems managers have a cron job that empties their null device every so often.

I've been lucky. I bought one of the newer Cygnetix NullDevs and now I don't have to empty it hardly at all. I think I last emptied it 4 months ago, when there was that big flame-war in the OSI group and my news software logged a lot of stuff to /dev/null and it almost overflowed. Remember back in the old days of UNIX? Shoot, the PDP-11s had those wimpy little 8-bit null devices that could only transfer something like 50kb/sec. Nowadays with the newer IPI null devices you can bitbucket data at almost bus speed.

mjr.