From the course: Unix Essential Training
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Suppressing output - Unix Tutorial
From the course: Unix Essential Training
Suppressing output
- [Instructor] We know how to send output to the screen and how to send it to a file. But what if we don't want any output at all? In this movie, we're going to learn how to suppress output completely. To do that, we need to know about something in Unix called /dev/null. /dev/null is often called the "null device" or the "bit bucket" or the "black hole". And it works a lot like a file. We can direct output to it. And any data that goes there will be discarded by Unix. So it's like sending data to a black hole. It just disappears. Once you know it's there, using it is very easy. For example, let's do ls -L, and of course, we get a listing of our current files. But if we instead take that and send the output to /dev/null, then we get no output. It didn't send it to our screen, it didn't send it to a file. It just went nowhere. All output was immediately flushed by the system. Let's try another example. Let's cat the…
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