Redirect to /dev/null

[Dan Nelson]

In the last episode (Oct 10), Max Clark said:
> What is the proper way to redirect output to /dev/null? I've been
> using the following in my crontab but output is still ending up in my
> mailbox.
>
> ... 2>&1 > /dev/null

I'm sure this is in a sh FAQ someplace:

What you did was dup fd1 onto fd2, then redirect fd1 to /dev/null:

        fd1 -> stdout        fd2 -> stderr
2>&1
        fd1 -> stdout        fd2 -> stdout
>/dev/null
        fd1 -> /dev/null     fd2 -> stdout

Swap the two redirects, so you redirect fd1 to /dev/null, then dup it
onto fd2:

        fd1 -> stdout        fd2 -> stderr
>/dev/null
        fd1 -> /dev/null     fd2 -> stdout
2>&1
        fd1 -> /dev/null     fd2 -> /dev/null


-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson at allantgroup.com