"Why?" Why not? In my case, the reason is because it's shorter to type. I would expect most longtime UNIX users have experienced what happens when, for one r

"Why?" Why not? In my case, the reason is because it's shorter to type. I would expect most longtime UNIX users have experienced what happens when, for one reason or another, /dev/null is not a null character device and you have scripts or programs writing to it as if it was. By the time you realize that this has happened, it's too late -- data has already been saved to this file. There may be various workarounds for this. I'm not a professional sysadmin. But in my case, for my own personal usage systems, by using my own null character device in my own tmpfs mounted folders, I can just test for the success/failure of the mknod command before I start redirecting anything to it. I don't need a /dev/null. But I do need mknod.