LINUX HACK 19

Hack 19. Suppress Standard Output and Error

Message

Sometime while debugging a shell script, you may not want to see either the standard output or standard error message. Use /dev/null as shown below for suppressing the output.

Suppress standard output using > /dev/null

This will be very helpful when you are debugging shell scripts, where you don’t want to display the echo statement and interested in only looking at the error messages.

 

#  cat  file.txt  >  /dev/null

#  ./shell-script.sh  >  /dev/null 

Suppress standard error using 2> /dev/null

This is also helpful when you are interested in viewing only the standard output and don’t want to view the error messages.

 

#  cat  invalid-file-name.txt  2>  /dev/null

#  ./shell-script.sh  2>  /dev/null