hysterical laughter; /dev/null must be something else then.....

[jenbass]

I had this vague idea that /dev/null was a place where you put things that you want to dissolve forevermore into the unknown never to be seen again, but in fact since i moved a few files in there earlier today and rebooted I'm (ahem) wondering if I could actually have been mistaken as nothing appears to work, I've been dropped into the shell to make amends. Can anyone tell me what is *supposed* to be in /dev/null for RH6.2? It certainly isn't a bunch of old discarded files, that's for sure.

[Derango]

What do you mean by "nothing appears to work"? You mean the whole system dosent work any more? If so...what files did you send to dev/null? :p

[jenbass]

Starts loading linux ok, then after the Welcome to RH bit where it starts the run level bits, It can't mount proc filesystem, configure kernel params, activate swap partitions (All say "dup2: baaaad file descriptor"), ....starts to check filesystem, same error, drops into shell for maintenance.
I just moved a bunch of stuff there that I was deleting,like an old tarball of a driver, an old copy of a config file.

[nopun]

If you've moved files to /dev/null, then you have overwritten the device file. It is normally used to receive stuff that might otherwise have gone to standard output. e.g.

echo "you aint gonna see this" >/dev/null

I take it you were hoping to use it as some kind of "recycle bin", which it isn't.

You need to recreate /dev/null using "mknod". I can't tell you the exact command because I am not at my Linux box so I can't give the correct major/minor numbers. Maybe your "/etc/makedev" script could help you here.

Hope that helps.

[jenbass]

Yes, that's exactly what I did, a bit off target there then, eh!
Thanks. That's what comes of doing stuff in a hurry first thing in the morning with a five year old at one elbow asking me to pour the maple syrup on her porridge, and a ten year old talking nonstop about something or other in great detail that I might have a chance of listening to had I had a cup of coffee or two, weren't being questioned in my other ear, and wasn't actually trying not to delete vital directories (and failing) due to lack of concentration.
There's probably a moral here. Or several......
Anyway, off to restore /dev/null then.