In my shell script I got these lines:
rm tempfl.txt
rm tempfl2.txt
If these do not exist I get the error messages:
rm: tempfl2.txt: No such file or directory
rm: tempfl.txt: No such file or directory
Is there a way to only suppress these messages even though they do not always appear, as the files might exist?
Try this command:
the -f option acts like this:
The command also doesn't report a non-zero error code in case the file doesn't exist.
you should redirect all error message to /dev/null like
As the other answers state, you can use
command 2> /dev/null
to throw away the error output fromcommand
But what is going on here?
>
is the operator used to redirect output.2
is a reference to the standard error output stream, i.e.2>
= redirect error output./dev/null
is the 'null device' which just swallows any input provided to it. You can combine the two to effectively throw away output from a command.Full reference:
> /dev/null
throw away stdout1> /dev/null
throw away stdout2> /dev/null
throw away stderr&> /dev/null
throw away both stdout and stderrAdding to the answers above: It is probably a better idea to keep error messages (like permission denied or some such). Just test existence of the file before deleting it:
This assumes a Bourne like shell, e.g., bash. The above has the additional benefit that it won't try to delete a directory, something
rm
can't do.You have two options:
Suppress
rm
warningsRedirect script output to
/dev/null
The latter has a drawback of missing all other warning messages produced by your script.
We can use
2> /dev/null
to suppress the output error and|| true
to ensure a success exit status:If you are using the command in a shell script, makefile, etc, maybe you need this.