How do I suppress shell script error messages?

Question

In my shell script I got these lines:

rm tempfl.txt rm tempfl2.txt 

If these do not exist I get the error messages:

rm: tempfl2.txt: No such file or directory rm: tempfl.txt: No such file or directory 

Is there a way to only suppress these messages even though they do not always appear, as the files might exist?

Answer 1

You have two options:

Suppress rm warnings

$ rm tempfl.txt 2> /dev/null 

Redirect script output to /dev/null

$ ./myscript.sh 2> /dev/null 

The latter has a drawback of missing all other warning messages produced by your script.

Answer 2

As the other answers state, you can use command 2> /dev/null to throw away the error output from command

But what is going on here?

> is the operator used to redirect output. 2 is a reference to the standard error output stream, i.e. 2> = redirect error output.

/dev/null is the 'null device' which just swallows any input provided to it. You can combine the two to effectively throw away output from a command.

Full reference:

• > /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