Why does tar appear to skip file contents when output file is /dev/null

Looking at the source code for mv, http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/file_cmds/file_cmds-220.7/mv/mv.c :

/*
 * If rename fails because we're trying to cross devices, and
 * it's a regular file, do the copy internally; otherwise, use
 * cp and rm.
 */
if (lstat(from, &sb)) {
    warn("%s", from);
    return (1);
}
return (S_ISREG(sb.st_mode) ?
    fastcopy(from, to, &sb) : copy(from, to));

...

int
fastcopy(char *from, char *to, struct stat *sbp)
{
...
while ((to_fd =
    open(to, O_CREAT | O_EXCL | O_TRUNC | O_WRONLY, 0)) < 0) {
        if (errno == EEXIST && unlink(to) == 0)
            continue;
        warn("%s", to);
        (void)close(from_fd);
        return (1);
}

In the first pass through the while loop, open(to, O_CREAT | O_EXCL | O_TRUNC | O_WRONLY, 0) will fail with EEXIST. Then /dev/null will be unlinked, and the loop repeated. But as you pointed out in your comment, regular files can't be created in /dev, so on the next pass through the loop, open(to, O_CREAT | O_EXCL | O_TRUNC | O_WRONLY, 0) is still going to fail.

I'd file a bug report with Apple. The mv source code is mostly unchanged from the FreeBSD version, but because OSX's devfs has that non-POSIX behavior with regular files, Apple should fix their mv.

The command will output the data from device /dev/null to the given file (mailbox of the root account). Since /dev/null responds just with end-of-file when reading from it nothing will be written to the file, but with the redirection > the shell will have cleared the file already. Actually this is equivalent to writing just

> /var/spool/mail/root

(i.e., the same without cat or /dev/null).