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What does “> /dev/null 2>&1″ mean?

Taken from http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2006/06/06/what-does-devnull-21-mean/ I remember being confused for a very long time about the trailing garbage in commands I saw in Unix systems, especially while watching compilers do their work. Nobody I asked could tell me what the funny greater-thans, ampersands and numbers after the commands meant, and search engines never turned up anything but examples of it being used without explanation. In this article I’ll explain those weird commands. Here’s an example command: wibble > /dev/null 2>&1 Output redirection The greater-thans ( > ) in commands like these redirect the program’s output somewhere. In this case, something is being redirected into /dev/null , and something is being redirected into &1 . Standard in, out, and error There are three standard sources of input and output for a program. Standard input usually comes from the keyboard if it’s an interactive program, or from another program if it’s processing the other pro