Surviving /dev/null disappearance

While porting mtpaint I stumbled upon a hacked up
configure script which has a test like this:

ld -o /dev/null <some libs>

If you run this under root the net result is you
don't have /dev/null anymore.

I fixed the configure script, writing to temp files
instead of /dev/null, but the question is, how can
I survive the situation.

Without /dev/null very little works. You can mount
a second devfs over the first one, but half of the
programs running in the background (e.g. wmii) are
still freaked out bad.

So is there a way to revive the system without a
reboot? (hint: /etc/rc.d/dev* scripts refuse to
work without /dev/null)