Question

I was given this syntax by user phi

find . | awk '!/((\.jpeg)|(\.jpg)|(\.png))$/ {print $0;}' | xargs grep "B206"

I would like to suppress the output of grep: can’t open….. and find: cannot open lines from the results.

sample output to be ignored:

grep: can't open ./cisc/.xdbhist
find: cannot open ./cisc/.ssh

Answer 1

Have you tried redirecting stderr to /dev/null ?

2>/dev/null

So the above redirects stream no.2 (which is stderr) to /dev/null. That’s shell dependent, but the above should work for most. Because find and grep are different processes, you may have to do it for both, or (perhaps) execute in a subshell. e.g.

find ... 2>/dev/null | xargs grep ... 2>/dev/null

Here’s a reference to some documentation on bash redirection. Unless you’re using csh, this should work for most.