suppress shell script error messages

Question

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: temp         


        

Answer 1

As the other answers state, you can use command 2> /dev/null to throw away the error output from command

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 stdout
• 1> /dev/null throw away stdout
• 2> /dev/null throw away stderr
• &> /dev/null throw away both stdout and stderr