Re: Writing CRON job to null.

[Stephan Engelke <engelke@math.uni-hamburg.de>]

Hi, 

> > 	command >/dev/null 2>&1
> > 
> What does the "2" and "1" stand for, and the "&" ?
> One is standard output, right?

2 is stderr, the standard error message output.
(For example, try "make > /tmp/foo"; /tmp/foo will be (almost) empty, since
make throws (almost) all messages to stderr.)

Regarding the ampersand-contruct:
Channel 2 is redirected to channel 1 which is redirected to /dev/null.
In short: all error messages go into the big bit bucket.

So long,
Stephan
-- 
Stephan Engelke                                    engelke@math.uni-hamburg.de
                        *** Life is not fair. But the root password helps. ***