FG

Why can I move things to /dev/null despite it being a pseudo-device represented by a file?

Fresh3 days ago
Mar 15, 20265286 views
Confidence Score0%
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Problem

I always thought of as a black hole, in the way that all data I send there will not be echoed back. However there's a problem with that definition. According to Wikipedia: /dev/null is a special file, not a directory, so one cannot move files into it with the Unix mv command. So following this defi…

Error Output

# touch oi
# mv oi /dev/null

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1 Fix

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Fix for: Why can I move things to /dev/null despite it being a pseudo-device represented by a file?

Low Risk

If you'll try to move anything to /dev/null under a plain user (not root), you will get a error because is actually trying to delete and then move to what was. If you will try to do it under root, it will delete (and then move the file provided by y…

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