What does “< /dev/null >& /dev/null” at the end of a command do?

Question

One of the scripts I run over ssh was hanging and I found a solution for it on this site: http://www.snailbook.com/faq/background-jobs.auto.html

The site resolves th

Answer 1

Yes, this means redirect both stdout and stderr to /dev/null.

From info "(bash)Redirections":

Redirecting Standard Output and Standard Error

Bash allows both the standard output (file descriptor 1) and the standard error output (file descriptor 2) to be redirected to the file whose name is the expansion of WORD with this construct.

There are two formats for redirecting standard output and standard error:

&>WORD

and

>&WORD

Of the two forms, the first is preferred. This is semantically equivalent to

>WORD 2>&1