Can /dev/null be deleted ??

[saunix]

We have a Production server and somebody has wiped out /dev/null.
I am not sure how and we don't want to reboot since it involves downtime...
the issue is lot of scripts don't work becos of it. When we login we get the following error.
-bash: /dev/null: Permission denied
-bash: /dev/null: Permission denied
-bash: /dev/null: Permission denied
-bash: /dev/null: Permission denied
-bash: /dev/null: Permission denied
-bash: /dev/null: Permission denied
-bash: /dev/null: Permission denied
-bash: /dev/null: Permission denied
Any suggestions, how to fix it without reboot and any idea how it was deleted. We have checked history and it doesn't tell us much.

[Lakshmipathi]

We have a Production server and somebody has wiped out /dev/null.
I am not sure how and we don't want to reboot since it involves downtime...
the issue is lot of scripts don't work becos of it. When we login we get the following error.
-bash: /dev/null: Permission denied
-bash: /dev/null: Permission denied
-bash: /dev/null: Permission denied
-bash: /dev/null: Permission denied
-bash: /dev/null: Permission denied
-bash: /dev/null: Permission denied
-bash: /dev/null: Permission denied
-bash: /dev/null: Permission denied
Any suggestions, how to fix it without reboot and any idea how it was deleted. We have checked history and it doesn't tell us much.

Are you sure? It says "Permission denied" not file not found.So i think try and login with appropriate username ..i think it should work ...
else try
ls -l /dev/null

[saunix]

Looks like somebody has tried to do something like "> /dev/null"
without the device actually existing - looking at the file contents will
probably give a hint as to how it happened...

ls -ltr /dev/null
shows it to be a regular file.

To correct it, I removed /dev/null, and re-create it with:

mknod -m 666 /dev/null c 1 3

i.e a character device, major/minor pair of 1,3, and world-writable.

That resolved the issue.