What does '>/dev/null 2>&1' mean in SHELL?
'>' is for redirection '/dev/null' is a black hole where any data sent, will be discarded '2' is the file descriptor for Standard Error '&' is the symbol for file descriptor (without it, the following 1 would be considered a filename) '1' is the file descriptor for Standard Out $ cat foo.txt foo bar baz redirection is the mechanism used to send the output of a command to another place. Here, for example, we are redirecting it to a file called out.txt: $ cat foo.txt > out.txt we could rewrite the command like this: $ cat foo.txt 1> out.txt we don’t see any output in the screen. We changed the standard output (stdout) location to a file. $ cat out.txt foo bar baz if we try to cat a file that doesn’t exist, like this: $ cat nop.txt > out.txt cat: nop.txt: No such file or directory we see the error output in the screen, because we are redirecting just the standard output, not the standard error. Using std...