In Unix-like Operating systems, /dev/zero is a special file that provides as many null characters (ASCII NULL, 0x00; not ASCII character "digit zero", "0", 0x30) as are read from it. One of the typical uses is to provide a character stream for overwriting information. Another might be to generate a clean file of a certain size. Using mmap to map /dev/zero to RAM is the BSD way of implementing shared memory.