Writing to null?

[Bryan]

In unix if I want to dump some output into never never land I can do
something like:
std:fstream outfile("/dev/null");

What is the equivalent in windows? /dev/null seems not to work properly.

Is it std:fstream outfile("NUL")?

Thanks,
B

 

[Mark P]

In unix if I want to dump some output into never never land I can do
something like:
std:fstream outfile("/dev/null");

What is the equivalent in windows? /dev/null seems not to work properly.

Is it std:fstream outfile("NUL")?

Thanks,
B

Not certain of this, but I would expect that you can simply default
construct an ofstream without specifying a file name.

 

[Jacek Dziedzic]

In unix if I want to dump some output into never never land I can do
something like:
std:fstream outfile("/dev/null");

What is the equivalent in windows? /dev/null seems not to work properly.

Is it std:fstream outfile("NUL")?

Don't know about now, but back in the old DOS days you could
indeed safely write to a special file/device called "NUL".

I am not sure that you are 100% guaranteed to be able
to bind an std:fstream to a "special file", but I would expect
it to work.

HTH,
- J.

 

[James Kanze]

Not certain of this, but I would expect that you can simply default
construct an ofstream without specifying a file name.

Yes, but that will result in an error; typically, an output
error will cause the code to fail. (Output errors are normally
fairly serious, except for secondary output, like logging.)

It's pretty simple to define a nulstreambuf, which emulates the
behavior of "/dev/null" exactly. (EOF for all reads, success
for all writes.) Then just create an ostream with this as the
streambuf.