In our production server suddenly /dev/null became a regular file and due to this sshd service got stopped and not able to login the server. And also we tried to the below steps to configure back to character device file, rm -rf /dev/null mknod /dev/null c 1 3 As soon as we run the rm command /dev/null is being re-created as a regular file before mknod can run. We can't figure out how this happening and which component is creating this file. So until we solve this issue we are unable to create /dev/null as character device file.