How to ignore error messages in bash on Ubuntu?

Question

I'm trying to show the number of lines, words and characters of all configuration files in /etc/*conf (with command wc).

How can I modify the command (or commandline) to not view the error messages?

score 26 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 25 '10 at 23:33

26

wc /etc/*conf 2>/dev/null

answered Mar 25 '10 at 23:33

Dennis Williamson

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 25 '10 at 22:39

4

i don't have access to a shell right now, but you can try something like

cat /etc/*.conf 2> /dev/null | wc -l

That should redirect all the errors and leave the output to be passed to wc

answered Mar 25 '10 at 22:39

Roy Rico

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered May 01 '13 at 07:10

Usually just redirect the standard output to /dev/null to ignore the output, but this is not good practice when writing shell scripts

Try use -q instead to run the shell in quite mode, which will produce less output.

This might not be relevant to the question, but just FYI.

3 Answers3