{
/your/first/command
/your/second/command
} &> /dev/null
To eliminate output from commands, you have two options:
Close the output descriptor file, which keeps it from accepting any more input. That looks like this:
your_command "Is anybody listening?" >&-
Usually, output goes either to file descriptor 1 (stdout) or 2 (stderr). If you close a file descriptor, you'll have to do so for every numbered descriptor, as &>
(below) is a special BASH syntax incompatible with >&-
:
/your/first/command >&- 2>&-
Be careful to note the order: >&-
closes stdout, which is what you want to do; &>-
redirects stdout and stderr to a file named -
(hyphen), which is not what what you want to do. It'll look the same at first, but the latter creates a stray file in your working directory. It's easy to remember: >&2
redirects stdout to descriptor 2 (stderr), >&3
redirects stdout to descriptor 3, and >&-
redirects stdout to a dead end (i.e. it closes stdout).
Also beware that some commands may not handle a closed file descriptor particularly well ("write error: Bad file descriptor"), which is why the better solution may be to...
Redirect output to /dev/null
, which accepts all output and does nothing with it. It looks like this:
your_command "Hello?" > /dev/null
For output redirection to a file, you can direct both stdout and stderr to the same place very concisely, but only in bash:
/your/first/command &> /dev/null
Finally, to do the same for a number of commands at once, surround the whole thing in curly braces. Bash treats this as a group of commands, aggregating the output file descriptors so you can redirect all at once. If you're familiar instead with subshells using ( command1; command2; )
syntax, you'll find the braces behave almost exactly the same way, except that unless you involve them in a pipe the braces will not create a subshell and thus will allow you to set variables inside.
{
/your/first/command
/your/second/command
} &> /dev/null
See the bash manual on redirections for more details, options, and syntax.