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Re:For the Love of Pipes by tripa on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @07:39AM (#18967816)
/dev/null behaves like an empty file, which is (or used to be?) a valid executable.

Cf http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/humor/ATT_Copyright_true.html or https://twitter.com/rob_pike/status/966896123548872705

Re:For the Love of Pipes by jwilk on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @06:29PM (#18973900)
In most contexts empty file is indeed a valid executable. Debian folks learned this the hard way recently:

https://bugs.debian.org/919341

However, executing /dev/null doesn't seem to work on Linux:

  $ sudo chmod 777 /dev/null 
  $ /dev/null
  bash: /dev/null: Permission denied