[gentoo-user] [OT] shell ouput which file descriptor

[Harry Putnam]

This is not a question about cvs... its only used for example.

I'm puzzled about a change in what I see when I run 
   cvs -n update 2> /dev/null

I've apparently lost the ability to remove stder from output.

I used that command to trim out file descriptor 2 which used to leave
a list of any changed files in the repo on the console, for a very
long time.


Suddenly there is no difference with:

      cvs -n update 2> /dev/null
         cvs -n update 

The stuff on stderr still shows in the ouput either way.

Further; 
  cvs -n update 2>er  (redirect stder to ./er)

Doesn't put anything in ./er

However cvs -n update 1>out   (redirect stdout to ./out)

Does catch the output I'm after and leave out stderr. (as one would
expect) 

So, again, apparently I've lost the ability to trim out stderr with a
redirect to /dev/null (cvs -n update 2> /dev/null)

-------        ---------       ---=---       ---------      --------

The only thing I've been tinkering with is evaluating the
/etc/DIR_COLORS file.  I switched from evaluating a custom version to
evaluating the default version.

That's when I first noticed the file descriptor anomaly but not sure
if was going before since I didn't notice it before.

So changed back to the original dir_colors... but the descriptor
problem is still here.

I've established a fresh login by ssh myusr@localhost

Still I see stderr in the console even when redirected with
  2> /dev/null

Anyone have an idea what I've done here, or what might explain what
I'm seeing?