[marvy]

I don't know about radioactive waste, but surely allowing untrusted user input into /dev is unrealistically sloppy. (Famous last words?)

I agree that having this as a bash feature versus just using nc doesn't seem to buy much. But I think having these in the actual file system is useful. So why not do both: expunge them from bash, and get them into /dev (or maybe /net, or wherever they belong).