tonyhamm

I found the problem!!  I had a bash script that was scheduled to run every other day that, as part of the script, was incorrectly redirecting the output of a command to /dev/null.  Because it was not doing the redirection of stdout and stderr it was overwriting the character device /dev/null with a regular file called /dev/null.
 
Anytime something was trying to redirect to /dev/null it was failing.
 
I have
removed the incorrect /dev/null file  created a new character device named /dev/null and finally corrected the redirection to  rm -rf *.1 > /dev/null 2>&1 instead of 
rm -rf *.1 2>&1 /dev/null  
Since making this change to script and running manually the permissions on /dev/null are staying
root@Tower:/dev# ll null crw-rw-rw- 1 root 1, 3 Nov 2 14:59 null