Zero-byte file

Article summary

A zero-byte file or zero-length file is a computer file containing no data. As the size (a.k.a. length) of a file is often measured in bytes, such a file has length of zero bytes. Although there are many ways to create a zero-byte file, one common way to intentionally create one is via the touch command. The command line touch abc creates a zero-byte file named . The creation of any file involves creating it with zero length, but usually data is written to a new file almost immediately after creation such that users don't generally notice files in a zero-byte state. The presence of a zero-byte file may indicate a failure of a program. One common scenario involves caching data in memory and then flushing to storage at a later time. A program that does not flush to storage (i.e. due to abnormal termination) may erroneously leave a zero-byte file. Sometimes, the time between file creation and writing data to it is long enough that a user does notice that the file has zero size before a program writes any content. Even a zero-byte file requires storage space since every file has file system metadata. The file system may allocate a minimum size of space to every file. Such file system parameters may be discovered via an operating system utility such as stat . Often this size is 4096 bytes. Some file formats include metadata (separate from file system metadata).…

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