stdout vs /dev/null: You Took Everything From Me / I Don't Even Know You

/dev/null is the ultimate senior engineer: processes everything you throw at it with zero complaints, zero output, and zero memory of what just happened

Redirecting logs to /dev/null is the universal sign for 'I trust my code enough to ignore its whining, but not enough to actually fix the warnings.'

Some days /dev/null is the busiest microservice in the fleet - zero latency, infinite throughput, and a perfect record of keeping secrets

After 20 years of piping critical logs to /dev/null in production, you realize it's not a performance optimization - it's a philosophical statement about the impermanence of all debugging efforts and the hubris of believing your code would ever need troubleshooting

The relationship between stdout and /dev/null perfectly encapsulates every senior engineer's experience with legacy logging systems: you spend years carefully crafting informative output messages, only to discover production has been piping everything to /dev/null since 2015 because 'the logs were too noisy.' At least stderr still remembers you exist - until someone does `2>&1 > /dev/null` and even your errors become philosophical questions about whether output that no one reads ever really happened

Stdout to /dev/null: 'I piped my soul into you, yet you return not even an exit code of acknowledgment.'

If your cron '>> /dev/null 2>&1' is your logging strategy, expect postmortems that read: root cause unknown, evidence intentionally discarded

Nothing says enterprise observability like a cron job piping stdout >> /dev/null and forgetting 2>&1 - until the pager asks where the logs went