You can redirect output for standard output and error output. Two examples:

(a) Some commands may echo info back to your screen during/after execution. So, you could do the following

Code:

cd mydir 1>/dev/null

Because during a script execution, the extra stuff is distracting.

(b) One that I use all of the time is with cleaning up files. I don't care if the work file doesn't exist in the example

Code:

rm mytempfile 2>/dev/null

Another example would be in getting a count of files

Code:

filecnt=$(ls -l myftempfile 2>/dev/null | wc -l)

Here I don't care about the error, as filecnt will be set to 0 zero anyway.

So, perhaps you can incorporate some part of this into your awk command.