Is /dev in linux virtual?

Posted by user973917 on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by user973917
Published on 2012-08-28T01:56:03Z Indexed on 2012/08/28 3:40 UTC
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DEV

Today at work a client had rm -rf /dev and ended up deleting two files in /dev/shm that forced his site to no longer work.

From what I learned previously /dev is not virtual, but a fellow technician had suggested to reboot the server because /dev is virtual like /proc. Sure enough I rebooted the server and the files that the client rm -rf'd were there.

So, my question is; is /dev virtual? Is it the kind of virtual like /proc? Is there more documentation on this? How can I restore the /dev files without a server reboot?

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