Mac- Strange ~/devnull file?

[applepie555]

I booted up my mac and found a file called 'devnull' in my user folder, which was 13gb. I tried opening it in textedit to see what it was but it kept freezing, as well as finder. I tried to delete it but finder didn't seem to want to. I finally was able to eliminate it using rm ~/devnull

It's gone now, but now I notice finder is crashing quite often.
What is this "devnull" file, and is it bad that I deleted it??

 

[wrldwzrd89]

This sounds like a runaway script that's improperly written. Check Activity Monitor and look for processes named "bash", "sh", "tcsh", etc.

 

[pmau]

The way to redirect output to "nothing" on unix like system is to do somthing like:

ls -la >/dev/null

So, some application, probably a "launchd" agent or daemon did something wrong.

If you are a little motivated, check your login items for some strange third-party junk you recently installed.

Deleting the open file while the app in question is running will not free the diskspace unless you logout or restart.