linux - How can I suppress error messages of a command?

Question

How can I suppress error messages for a shell command?

For example, if there are only jpg files in a directory, running ls *.zip gives an error message:

   $ ls *.zip
   ls: cannot access '*.zip': No such file or directory

Is there an option to suppress such error messages? I want to use this command in a Bash script, but I want to hide all errors.

Answer 1

Most Unix commands, including ls, will write regular output to standard output and error messages to standard error, so you can use Bash redirection to throw away the error messages while leaving the regular output in place:

ls *.zip 2> /dev/null