Say hello to your little friend in busybox: mdev

Previously I blogged on how Linux sysfs had helped me create device files that are no longer actually on a physical filesystem. Well at least modern OS's do it that way. I think FreeBSD also does it this way, but OpenBSD definitely doesn't.

I had an inkling that Busybox had some little tool to do this but I was too lazy to look for it, and it was fun trolling /sys.

But by accident this morning I typed mdev instead of mkdev (my shell script) and I learned that the following command creates the device files for you:

mdev -s


Voila! And much faster. I had to disable my shell script by default because it sometimes took 3-4 minutes on Q on my Powerbook 12".