Shell Programming and Scripting

I am executing commands as follows in Bourne shell script. Filenames/directory names for the deletion/copying are unknown:

rm *
rmdir <directory>
cp -p * <directory>

Sometimes when no file or directory exists, error is encountered. This has no impact or whatever issue to my script but it's ugly to show to the users.

I want to prevent the error message from being displayed. Is there a way for me to prevent it?

Code:

rm * 2> /dev/null
rmdir <directory> 2> /dev/null
cp -p * <directory> 2> /dev/null

Just redirect the output to /dev/null directory. If you get any error it will be redirected to this directory.

Code:

rm * 2>/dev/null

Actually I tried this before but it failed. I could still see the error message. See the following:

> rm * >/dev/null
rm: No match.


> rm * 2>/dev/null
rm: No match.

the * will be evaluated bij the shell, if there's nothing to remove, it'll give an error.

send the std-err to the std-out:

rm * > /dev/null 2>&1

Thanks a lot, pjottum. It works now