danielinsley.com

I've been having problems where the output of binaries was not being redirected properly from within Ruby when invoked as followed:

  >> `ls -l &> /dev/null`
  => "total 4 drwxr-xr-x 2 dinsley dinsley 4096 2007-05-08 20:00 Peepcode - Rest"

If the shell supports this piping convention, it should return the following:

  >> `ls -l &> /dev/null`
  => ""

Ubuntu currently ships with the '/bin/sh' symbolic link pointing to '/bin/dash' with the reasoning that it executes scripts somewhat faster than bash. There are some drawbacks to this. One of these is that stdout redirection of output from the binary will not be redirected to /dev/null if redirecting it via &>, as it isn't supported in dash.

To fix this, all you need to do is remove the existing symbolic link to dash and replace it with a link to bash instead:

  $ sudo rm /bin/sh
  $ sudo ln -s /bin/bash /bin/sh