How to supress Error output to console

[amitoengg]

Hello,

Any ideas how to supress error output to console for cmd like finger from a shell script.

finger: connect: Connection refused
finger: connect: No route to host

(Any other cmd equivalent to finger , which can help finding out ip of the machine on which a particular user is logged in !!)

Regards
AS

[Franklin52]

Hi,

Redirect the output of stderr (descriptor 2) to /dev/null:

command 2>/dev/null

Regards

[Cabhan]

Yes. Do you know how to redirect normal output?

To redirect output, we do "COMMAND > FILE". The single '>' means erase this file, while a '>>' means append to this file.

The same applies to error redirecting, except that we need to prepend a '2'. This is because the stderr stream is stream 2.

So for instance:

finger idontexist 2> /dev/null

/dev/null is a special file that simply ignores all content. So you can write to it if you want to just dispose of input.