Tag: bash script

2>/dev/null

A few times now, I’ve encountered individuals with cron jobs or bash scripts where a command execution ends in 2>/dev/null … and the individual is stymied by the fact it’s not working but there’s no clue as to why. The error output is being sent into a big black hole never to escape!

The trick here is to understand file descriptors — 1 is basically a shortcut name for STDOUT and 2 is basically a shortcut name for STDERR (0 is STDIN, although that’s not particularly relevant here).  So 2>/dev/null says “take all of the STDERR stuff and redirect it to /dev/null”.

Sometimes you’ll see both STDERR and STDOUT being redirected either to a file or to /dev/null — in that case you will see 2>&1 where the ampersand prior to the “1” indicates the stream is being redirected to a file descriptor (2>1 would direct STDOUT to a file named “1”) — so >/dev/null 2>&1 is the normal way you’d see it written. Functionally, >/dev/null 1>&2 would be the same thing … but redirecting all output into error is, conceptually, a little odd.

To visualize all of this, use a command that will output something to both STDERR and STDOUT — for clarify, I’ve used “1>/dev/null” (redirect STDOUT to /devnull) in conjunction with 2>&1 (redirect STDERR to STDOUT). As written in the text above, the number 1 is generally omitted and just >/dev/null is written.

 

 

Shell Script: Path To Script

We occasionally have to re-home our shell scripts, which means updating any static path values used within scripts. It’s quick enough to build a sed script to convert /old/server/path to /new/server/path, but it’s still extra work.

The dirname command works to provide a dynamic path value, provided you use the fully qualified path to run the script … but it fails spectacularly whens someone runs ./scriptFile.sh and you’re trying to use that path in, say, EXTRA_JAVA_OPTS. The “path” is just . — and Java doesn’t have any idea what to do with “-Xbootclasspath/a:./more/path/goes/here.jar”

Voila, realpath gives you the fully qualified file path for /new/server/path/scriptFile.sh, ./scriptFile.sh, or even bash scriptFile.sh … and the dirname of a realpath is the fully qualified path where scriptFile.sh resides:

#!/bin/bash
DIRNAME=`dirname $(realpath "$0")`
echo ${DIRNAME}

Hopefully next time we’ve got to re-home our batch jobs, it will be a simple scp & sed the old crontab content to use the new paths.