Bhasker R.

It is a bit bucket in Unix where you dump things you don't need. When you need to discard output from your command , you can redirect it to /dev/null. In Unix, an external device is treated as a file. All such devices are found as files in /dev directory. It is a Null device . Suppose you need to search for a pattern, but do not need it to be displayed to the console, but need the exit code of the command, we can do grep pattern filename > /dev/null # search without displaying it to console. echo $? # exit code You can also redirect your standard error messages from a command to /dev/null as $cmd 2> /dev/null Here 2> represents standard error. /dev/null is the bit-bucket: the place where you dump anything you don't need. /dev/null is a special file-system object that throws away everything written into it. Redirecting a stream into it means hiding an output.