How can I suppress all output from a command using Bash?

Question

The following sends standard output to the null device (bit bucket).

scriptname >/dev/null

And if you also want error messages to be sent there, use one of (the first may not work in all shells):

scriptname &>/dev/null
scriptname >/dev/null 2>&1
scriptname >/dev/null 2>/dev/null

And, if you want to record the messages, but not see them, replace /dev/null with an actual file, such as:

scriptname &>scriptname.out

For completeness, under Windows cmd.exe (where “nul” is the equivalent of “/dev/null”), it is:

scriptname >nul 2>nul