A Shorter Way To Send stdout and stderr to /dev/null

When we’re scripting or running a command on Linux we sometimes don’t want any output from the command. This output may be the success message from the command on stdout (standard output) or an error message on stderr (standard error).

The usual way to do this is with the classic:

$ <COMMAND> 2>&1 >/dev/null

This redirects stderr into stdout and then sends stdout to the bitbucket /dev/null.

Instead, we can use the following:

$ <COMMAND> &>/dev/null

The &> redirects both stderr and stdout to /dev/null.

It’s not much of a saving but it will make your scripts and oneliners a little cleaner.