I read the Wikipedia article on /dev/null
and was playing around by moving files to /dev/null
.
For this I created a test_file
and put some contents in it:
$ touch test_file
$ echo "This is written by Aditya" > test_file
$ cat test_file
This is written by Aditya
Thereafter I tried to move the file to /dev/null
:
$ mv test_file /dev/null
mv: inter-device move failed: ‘test_file’ to ‘/dev/null’; unable to remove target: Permission denied
Since, this gave me a Permission denied
Error; I went ahead and used sudo
as I normally do whenever I encounter a Permission denied
error.
$ sudo mv test_file /dev/null
The command succeeded and test_file
is no longer present in the directory.
However, the Wikipedia article says that it is not possible to recover anything moved to /dev/null
and it gives an EOF
to any process that tries to read from it. But, I can read from /dev/null
:
$ cat /dev/null
This is written by Aditya
What did I do wrong and how do I fix /dev/null
back to normal? And why did I encounter Permission denied
error in the first place?