How to use /dev/null: 2-Minute Linux Tips

Hi, this is Sandra Henry-Stocker, author of the “Unix as a Second Language” blog on NetworkWorld.
In this Linux tip, we’re going to look at a special device called /dev/null – sometimes referred to as the “bit bucket” -- that acts something like a black hole on the Linux command line. Send output to /dev/null and it simply disappears.
OK, that was easy, but why would anyone want to do this? Well, there really are times when a command’s output isn’t interesting. Even if you need to run the command, you won’t always want to see its output.
For example, the find command – one that, by its very nature, is likely to generate some “permission denied” errors.
Using 2>, we see the output we’re looking for, but hide the errors. You can select which output you send to /dev/null using the 1> (normal standard out) and 2 (error) output.
And if you want to know if any errors were generated, you can find out like this:
The 1 is the return code from the command and anything greater than 0 indicates there were errors.
If, for some reason, you only want to see the errors, try this instead:
You can also use /dev/null to empty a file. If you want to remove the contents of a file without removing the file itself, you can do something like this:
You can, however, do the same thing more simply with a command like this:

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