We are trying to clean up after moving EMC BCV's to another cluster. What happens after you do this is that commands such as vgs report problems - problems we'd rather not see, because they break our automation.
insf/rmsf can also manipulate HP-UX's list of currently-active devices, as well as operate on HP hardware paths and entire device classes. rm just removes files on the filesystem.
There is no equivalent because Linux doesn't manage devices and drivers the same way that HP-UX does. If the only thing you need is to change files out under /dev, you can use the MAKEDEV script to create them and rm to remove them. If you need to do any of the other things that insf/rmsf/etc do then you'll have a different procedure to follow.
Since the "open failed" messages look like they're devices from EMC's multipath software, you should probably make sure that there isn't any special EMC procedure before you manually remove device files.
