topic supressing error messages in Operating System - HP-UX

supressing error messages

Party — Sat, 18 Dec 2004 10:20:16 GMT

Hi,
Can somebody help me in solving this small problem ...I want to avoid displaying the error messages on the screen (Eg:Given)while
searching for a particular file
find / -name test -print |grep -sv test
find: cannot search /etc/ftpd (Errors)
find: cannot open /etc/opt/resmon/persistence
find: cannot open /etc/opt/resmon/pipe
find: cannot open /etc/sam/custom
find: cannot search /etc/Tivoli/tec
find: cannot open /tmp/.AgentSockets
find: cannot search /tmp/mail.old/maillog.31104
find: cannot open /home/jhazen

Thanks
Bins

Re: supressing error messages

Robert-Jan Goossens — Sat, 18 Dec 2004 11:38:04 GMT

Hi,

Try this.

# find / -name test -type f | xargs grep -l "test"

Robert-Jan

Re: supressing error messages

Party — Sat, 18 Dec 2004 11:53:28 GMT

Hi

It is not working

Thanks
Binu

Re: supressing error messages

A. Clay Stephenson — Sat, 18 Dec 2004 12:10:10 GMT

find / -name 'test' -type f 2>/dev/null | grep -sv 'test'

Re: supressing error messages

Bill Hassell — Sat, 18 Dec 2004 22:43:19 GMT

The error messages are written to stderr rather than stdout. Since your screen is (by default) configured to show both, just redirect the errors (stderr) to /dev/null by using file descriptor 2:

find / -name test 2>/dev/null

I'm not sure why your grep -v is there. The combination of -name test with grep -v test will produce nothing. Note also that grep is non-selective. That means that it will match /var/tmp/testing. Now in your example, find will locate *ANYTHING* with test as a name (ie, directory, socket, symbolic link, named pipe, file, etc). If you are looking for a file, add -type f to your search.

And lastly, if this is a single user workstation, find / is probably OK. But on a large server, the search will interfere with every program that also uses the disks. It will search mounted CDROMs, NFS mounpoints on other computers, all the database files, etc. When you are looking for a particulat file, it is less invasive (and much faster) to limit the search to a specific set of directories.