[ILUG] /dev/null /dev/nulled

[Kenn Humborg]

On Tue, Mar 21, 2000 at 09:10:44PM +0000, Matthew Sammon wrote:
> 
> While logged in as root a shell script I was messing with did the
> following:
> cp /dev/null /tmp/temp1
> ....
> rm --force /tmp/temp1
> rm --force /dev/null
> 
> With the result that /dev/null now appears as:
> 5979 -rw-------   1 root     root           21 Mar 21 21:03 null

What's happened is that, after you deleted /dev/null, some daemon
or script or something is writing to /dev/null, probably by shell
redirection, causing it to be re-created as an ordinary file.

> I cannot remove or rename this corrupt /dev/null, it always remains
> there, so when I try to do a :
> mknod /dev/null c 000 000
> I get:
> mknod: /dev/null: File exists
> 
> Any ideas as to how to fix this, as several programs are complaining
> about the situation at regular intervals (zsh syslogd etc..)

Do this

# mv -f dev/null /dev/null-tmp && mknod /dev/null c 1 3 && rm -f /dev/null-tmp

If it doesn't work, keeping trying it until it does work.
The offending background script might run between the mv and 
the mknod, creating /dev/null as a file again.

Later,
Kenn