I still am not convinced it is a leaky abstraction because of this. Perhaps it is a surprising one, it certainly took me a while to learn about it, I don&#x27;t think I really appreciated universal file I&#x2F;O until I worked through a bit of <i>The Linux Programming Interface</i> (recommended!). I see the filesystem now as a standard interface to many parts of the system (including hardware, processes, kernel state, etc) through the kernel. I don&#x27;t think that &#x2F;proc&#x2F;1 <i>is a process</i>, it is an interface to information about a process. It makes sense to me UEFI variables are exposed this way. In fact if anything I&#x27;d say the abstraction is not leaky enough here: deleting the files deletes information on firmware, isn&#x27;t that the promise of a &quot;regular&quot; file? :) Again, I am <i>not</i> defending the current behavior! There&#x27;s nothing about the abstraction that says such a file must obey to `rm` in this way.<p>I recently ran into a funny bug, however, that makes me more sympathetic to your point. In Emacs a version of TRAMP mode (which is used to connect to remote servers or to connect locally as a different user) would try to cleanup itself by deleting some sort of tramp history file after a session. And if the history file didn&#x27;t exist to begin with (or if a setting disabled it, I&#x27;m not sure exactly) someone thought it appropriate to simply open up &quot;&#x2F;dev&#x2F;null&quot;, throwing away all writes to the file -- OK, makes sense so far.<p>But in TRAMP I often connect as root to my own machine -- it makes it easy to edit files as root, or run a shell in root. And as root you have the power to delete &#x2F;dev&#x2F;null! So, TRAMP would delete it without my knowledge... what&#x27;s odd is that it quickly gets created again (perhaps by Emacs) so that it appears to exist, except that suddenly a) it&#x27;s a regular file and b) it&#x27;s owned as root without world write&#x2F;read permission, so that suddenly all sorts of things start to fail because they can&#x27;t open &#x2F;dev&#x2F;null. Fun.