> What would happen if as root I did cat /dev/mem > /dev/null
As non-root, permission denied... as root, not much.
> cat /dev/null > /dev/mem
Non-root, permission denied. Root, not much (/dev/null is treated as a zero length file, nothing is written to /dev/mem).
For something spectacular to happen, you'll want to do cat something more intesting into /dev/mem, like /dev/zero. I just tried it on an old Packard Bell, it quickly rebooted back to the BIOS splash screen. Not sure if the result is hardware dependent or if they all do that. At any rate, probably best not to do bad things to /dev/mem if you filesystems mounted or hardware attached that you care a lot about ;).
~ Daniel
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