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I successfully deleted my /dev/null. How can I restore it? The OS is Ubuntu.

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I once found that /dev/null was replaced with a normal file which only root could write to. I thought for a moment that I would have to reinstall everything but as mentioned below, the recovery is trival if you know the trick. – Stuart Woodward Dec 24 '11 at 12:15

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mknod /dev/null c 1 3

Use this command to create /dev/null or use null(4) manpage for further help.

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For completeness, I'd note that this applies to all linux-based systems; other systems may have different numbers. – Random832 Dec 21 '11 at 14:53
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Under many traditional unices, you can recreate devices with their default permissions with the MAKEDEV script. This script is traditionally in /dev but is in /sbin on Ubuntu. Pass it an argument that indicates what devices you want to create; on Ubuntu that's std (you can write MAKEDEV null as well, that creates null as well as a number of other devices).

Under modern Linux systems running udev, you can tell udev to recreate all or some devices based on available drivers and connected hardware, through udevadm trigger:

udevadm trigger --sysname-match=null
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