How to make cp command quiet when no file is found in Bash?

Question

I searched man cp, but can find no quiet option, so that cp does not report "No such file or directory".

How can I make cp not print this error if it attempts, but fails, to copy the file?

Answer 1

The general solution is to redirect stderr to the bit bucket:

 cp old_file new_file 2>>/dev/null

Doing so will hide any bugs in your script, which means that it will silently fail in various circumstances. I use >> rather than > in the redirect in case it's necessary to use a log file instead.

Answer 2

rsync -avzh --ignore-missing-args /path/to/source /path/to/destination

ignore-missing-args: errors ignored are those related to source files not existing

Answer 3

If you want to suppress just the error messages:

cp original.txt copy.txt 2>/dev/null

If you want to suppress bot the error messages and the exit code use:

cp original.txt copy.txt 2>/dev/null || :

Answer 4

Well everyone has suggested that redirecting to /dev/null would prevent you from seeing the error, but here is another way. Test if the file exists and if it does, execute the cp command.

[[ -e f.txt ]] && cp f.txt ff.txt

In this case, if the first test fails, then cp will never run and hence no error.

Answer 5

Redirect:

cp ... 2>/dev/null

Answer 6

Like for any error printed to STDERR, just redirect it to /dev/null:

cp a b 2> /dev/null