How to hide command line output

Question

I understand that computers work faster if they don't have to output data to the user, so I'm wondering if there is a way to hide the printed lines in the Terminal, and eventually just print any errors.

Is that possible and would that make the OS run faster in anyway?

Answer 1

you can redirect STDOUT to /dev/null this will prevent printing output and only prints STDERR to your terminal.

You can use it like

yourfavouriteprogram > /dev/null

And yes, it is faster:

time head -100000 large_file.txt
real    0m16.570s
user    0m0.009s
sys     0m0.189s

time head -100000 large_file.txt > /dev/null
real    0m0.018s
user    0m0.014s
sys     0m0.004s