Question

in tcsh I’m trying to redirect STDERR from a command from my .aliases file.

I found that I can redirect STDERR from the command line like this. . .

$ (xemacs > /dev/tty) >& /dev/null 

. . . but when I put this in my .aliases file I get an alias loop. . .

$ cat .aliases alias xemacs '(xemacs > /dev/tty ) >& /dev/null' $ xemacs & Alias loop. $ 

. . . so I put a backslash before the command in .aliases, which allows the command to run. . .

$ cat .aliases alias xemacs '(\xemacs > /dev/tty ) >& /dev/null' $ xemacs & [1] 17295 $  

. . . but now I can’t give the command any arguments:

$ xemacs foo.txt & Badly placed ()'s. [1]    Done                          ( \xemacs > /dev/tty ) >& /dev/null $  

Can anyone offer any solutions? Thank you in advance!

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UPDATE: I’m still curious if it’s possible to redirect STDERR in tcsh from .aliases, but as has been suggested here, I ended up with a shell script:

#!/bin/sh # wrapper script to suppress messages sent to STDERR on launch # from the command line. /usr/bin/xemacs '$@' 2>/dev/null 

Answer 1

I suspect this is a case where NOT using an alias is the best option – try using a shell script instead:

#!/bin/tcsh  (xemacs $* > /dev/tty ) >& /dev/null