[PLUG] Something funny going on...

[Colin Kuskie]

On Thu, Aug 01, 2002 at 06:16:44PM -0700, Felix Lee wrote:
> On Thu, 1 Aug 2002, Colin Kuskie wrote:
> > [colink at rock ~]$ perl -V
> > syntax error at /dev/null line 1, near "=="
> > Execution of /dev/null aborted due to compilation errors.
> 
> if /dev/null is a file, then the problem will be evanescent
> because many things will write to /dev/null, so any program
> that relies on /dev/null having null input will have
> unpredictable behavior.
> 
> The answer mentioned everywhere:
>     sudo echo >/dev/null
> is not going to fix any underlying problem.  So the person
> who wrote the answer is either being dumb or is fucking
> around.  If you do find that your problem was that /dev/null
> was an ordinary file, please write the FAQ maintainer and
> have the answer fixed.

I think echo > /dev/null is only supposed to test /dev/null, not fix
it, in order to fix it, you have to delete and recreate the device,
according to this recipe:

  rm /dev/null
  mknod /dev/null c 1 3
  chmod a+rw /dev/null

In any case, at least now I can get around to getting the info I need for
my bug report for mod_perl.

Colin