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I tried to get a file via ftp from comand line (ssh), I forgot to specify a directory. It shows up as file saved to: â/dev/nullâ

Does that mean that the file was discarded? or is it somewhere saved on my remote machine?

Length: 524288000 (500M) [application/zip]
Saving to: â/dev/nullâ
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    "... via ftp from comand line (ssh)"? Do you mean sftp or scp? Perhaps it might help if you show the command you used?
    – Shawn Chin
    Sep 11, 2012 at 17:03
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    Are the funny characters at the beginning and end of /dev/null (they show up a an 'a' with a caret '^' on top) part of the filename or just mangled markup?
    – Jens
    Sep 11, 2012 at 17:16
  • Rather than just thanking @Jens, it would be more helpful to answer his question, and show us exactly what command you used. Sep 11, 2012 at 17:49
  • You might want to look for a directory â in the current directory with sub-directory dev containing a file nullâ. Alternatively, it is just the message that is scrambled, and your file really was saved to /dev/null, in which case, it is not going to be possible to get it back (you'll have to FTP it again). Sep 11, 2012 at 18:33
  • @JonathanLeffler I doubt such a directory would be there. The â appears to be a decoding error for quote chars. It shows up often enough as an output of wget -O /dev/null.
    – Shawn Chin
    Sep 12, 2012 at 9:12

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Your file was saved to the null device (/dev/null) which is a virtual file that discards anything that is save to it. In other words, the command you used downloaded the file and threw it away.

You'll need to download it again.

But why â/dev/nullâ ?

The â's that appeared were meant to be quotes which your terminal may have misinterpreted. See this page for an explanation, and if the circumstances matches yours, a fix.

Without that encoding problem, you would have seen something like:

Length: 524288000 (500M) [application/zip]
Saving to: ‘/dev/null’

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