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Topic: .xinitrc, Could someone explain .xinitrc?

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SuperLou

Group: Members
Posts: 124
Joined: April 2005

Posted: May 23 2005,15:44

So while I was disabling the dillo start window in ~/.xinitrc, i saw that after each command there is a ">/dev/null". Could someone explain what these mean or what they do. Also, there is one line of text that is just "fi", no & or >/dev/null or anything.

Thanks,
Louis

cbagger01

Group: Members
Posts: 4264
Joined: Oct. 2003

Posted: May 23 2005,16:05

">" is the character that is used for command line program output redirection.

Say for example, you try a directory:

ls

and you get:

media
textfile.txt
and so on.

If you do:

ls > directory.txt

it will take this output and send it to the file named directory.txt

Now if you send it to

"/dev/null"

this is the device file that represents null or nothing

So when you send the output to /dev/null, it means that you are
throwing away any standard output text messages.

To make a short story long, this makes a command "quiet" because it discards the normal status messages that are generated by that command.

SuperLou

Group: Members
Posts: 124
Joined: April 2005

Posted: May 23 2005,16:39

Ok. So messages would pop up where without the > null. Why doesn't "fi" need a > null?

clacker

Group: Members
Posts: 570
Joined: June 2004

Posted: May 23 2005,17:57

fi doesn't need one because it's the end of the "if" statement. "fi" is "if" backwards, just like the end of a case statement is esac)

if [true] then
do this
and this
and then this
fi