How to silence output in a Bash script?

Question

I have a program that outputs to stdout and would like to silence that output in a Bash script while piping to a file.

For example, running the program will output:<

Answer 1

For output only on error:

so [command]

Answer 2

If it outputs to stderr as well you'll want to silence that. You can do that by redirecting file descriptor 2:

# Send stdout to out.log, stderr to err.log
myprogram > out.log 2> err.log

# Send both stdout and stderr to out.log
myprogram &> out.log      # New bash syntax
myprogram > out.log 2>&1  # Older sh syntax

# Log output, hide errors.
myprogram > out.log 2> /dev/null

Answer 3

Note: This answer is related to the question "How to turn off echo while executing a shell script Linux" which was in turn marked as duplicated to this one.

To actually turn off the echo the command is:

stty -echo

(this is, for instance; when you want to enter a password and you don't want it to be readable. Remember to turn echo on at the end of your script, otherwise the person that runs your script won't see what he/she types in from then on. To turn echo on run:

stty echo

Answer 4

All output:

scriptname &>/dev/null

Portable:

scriptname >/dev/null 2>&1

Portable:

scriptname >/dev/null 2>/dev/null

For newer bash (no portable):

scriptname &>-

Answer 5

Try with:

myprogram &>/dev/null

to get no output

Answer 6

Useful in scripts:

---

Get only the STDERR in a file, while hiding any STDOUT even if the program to hide isn't existing at all (does not ever hang parent script), this alone was working:

stty -echo && ./programMightNotExist 2> errors.log && stty echo

---

Detach completely and silence everything, even killing the parent script won't abort ./prog :

 ./prog </dev/null >/dev/null 2>&1 &