2> Allows us to redirect standard error.
Taking advantage of rm’s ability to not delete files recursively can come in handy, especially when writing clean up scripts, but it can be noisy when you don’t care.
Give this file structure:
~/
tmpfile1.txt
tmpfile2.txt
tmpfile3.txt
tmpfile4.txt
do-not-delete/
secrets.yml
I may want to delete all the files, but not touch the directories (to keep file removal simple)
$ rm *
rm: cannot remove 'do-not-delete': Is a directory
$ ls
~/
do-not-delete/
secrets.yml
Because the directory error message comes over stderr, we can simply redirect it to /dev/null to ignore it:
rm * 2> /dev/null