How can I write to the NUL device under Windows from node.js?

Question

How can I write to the NUL device under Windows from node.js?

This is bugging me for several days now. I know about the standard stream redirection to the NUL device, but this isn't the case. node.js uses CreateFileW under its fs native/libuv bindings.

Unfortunately using something like:

require('fs').writeFileSync('NUL', 'foo')

creates a NUL file into the cwd that has 3 bytes.

I tried writing to the \Device\Null, but since I'm pretty much a *nix head where everything is a file, I failed to actually find a working path for \Device\Null. Such as \\.\Device\Null that throws ENOENT.

Any ideas about how to make this work under Windows?

This seems to be related, but I can not track the whole flow from lib/fs.js to uv/src/win/fs.c to check that the path argument doesn't suffer from some kind of relative to absolute path resolution.

windows
node.js
null
device
nul

Answer 1

There is a long workaround, like code it yourself. But you can take an idea from here https://github.com/hanshuebner/node-hid/blob/master/src/HID.cc and write a wrapper over C library.