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