Contents

nullDevice

The file handle associated with a null device.

Declaration

class var nullDevice: FileHandle { get }

Return Value

A file handle associated with a null device.

Discussion

You can use null-device file handles as “placeholders” for standard-device file handles or in collection objects to avoid exceptions and other errors resulting from messages being sent to invalid file handles. Read messages sent to a null-device file handle return an end-of-file indicator (an empty NSData object) rather than raise an exception. Write messages are no-ops, whereas fileDescriptor returns an illegal value. Other methods are no-ops or return “sensible” values.

When using this method to create a file handle object, the file handle owns its associated file descriptor and is responsible for closing it.

See Also

Related Documentation

Getting a File Handle