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From: leo@philmds.UUCP (Leo de Wit)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions,comp.bugs.4bsd
Subject: Re: more unix jokes - /dev/null
Keywords: poor man's Unix
Message-ID: <811@philmds.UUCP>
Date: 19 Sep 88 19:56:41 GMT
References: <8488@smoke.ARPA> <26090@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> <1049@sybase.sybase.com> <1414@star.cs.vu.nl>
Reply-To: leo@philmds.UUCP (Leo de Wit)
Organization: Philips I&E DTS Eindhoven
Lines: 43

In article <1414@star.cs.vu.nl> maart@cs.vu.nl (Maarten Litmaath) writes:
>If one wants to run a command with output getting discarded, the obvious
>solution is:
>
>	command > /dev/null
>
>But what would you do if you happened to have no such device? :-)
>Is the intended still possible?
>
>Yes! (Better use the Bourne shell.)
>
>
>	command 1< /etc/passwd 2<&1
>
>:-)

Maybe I'm missing something here, but this redirection also screws up
your input (is that the joke perhaps 8-). Try cat for command. After
the first line has been typed (from your terminal), the command
finishes.
But if you run the Bourne shell, you can also do something like:

    command >&-

or

    command 2>&-

which closes the standard output, resp. the standard error for 'command'.
Or you can even do

    exec >&- 2>&-

and don't have to worry about output anymore ;-) !

This one's nice too:

    exec <&-

And now I give back the pipe to Maarten (a Dutch phrase that sounds like
redirection 8-).

                   Leo.