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How can I suppress error messages for a shell command?
For example, if there are only jpg files in a directory, running ls *.zip gives an error message:
$ ls *.zip ls: cannot access '*.zip': No such file or directory Is there an option to suppress such error messages? I want to use this command in a Bash script, but I want to hide all errors.
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> /dev/null throw away stdout. 1> /dev/null throw away stdout. 2> /dev/null throw away stderr. &> /dev/null throw away both stdout and stderr.
To silence the output of a command, we redirect either stdout or stderr — or both — to /dev/null. To select which stream to redirect, we need to provide the FD number to the redirection operator.
If you are looking to suppress or hide all the output of a bash shell script from Linux command line as well as from the crontab then you can simply redirect all the output to a file known as /dev/null . This file is known as Black Hole which will engulf everything you give without complaining.
For an Entire Session... To suppress a particular error message for the remainder of the session, click the "More information" icon to the left of the message, choose Turn Off This Message, and click OK: Subsequent evaluations will not produce the message: Copy to clipboard.
Most Unix commands, including ls, will write regular output to standard output and error messages to standard error, so you can use Bash redirection to throw away the error messages while leaving the regular output in place:
ls *.zip 2> /dev/null 
$ ls *.zip 2>/dev/null will redirect any error messages on stderr to /dev/null (i.e. you won't see them)
Note the return value (given by $?) will still reflect that an error occurred.
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