Re: dynamically created /dev/null is a regular file

[Brook Milligan <brook%nmsu.edu@localhost>]

On Jun 24, 2015, at 10:37 PM, David Holland wrote:
>> Is this related to kern/33023?
> 
> It might be; but given that this mode gets used a fair amount, and
> also that the device should be getting created in the top of the
> unionfs, I would guess more likely not.

I'm not actually using unionfs, but the PR suggested similar issues.  Perhaps just a red herring.

> I would do a quick look for something (e.g. in your shell startup
> files) that's clobbering /dev/null somehow. I had a horrible
> intermittent problem with this at one point until I discovered that
> less would do it for you if you linked .lesshst to /dev/null…

The startup scripts are just what is in the release.  All I have done is untar them, set variables in rc.conf (and a few other things like create resolv.conf and edit mail/aliases) and boot.  None of this should be changing what the startup scripts do.

There are indeed a bunch of redirections to /dev/null in the startup scripts.  Presumably some of these are running before init generates the device files and therefore create the errant file.  The init man page documents that the device files are created, but not when that happens.  Is it possible that this is happening after (at least some of) the startup scripts are run?  Should the timing of this be added to the man page for completeness?

Thanks again for your help.

Cheers,
Brook