Follow-up Comment #1, bug #49466 (project findutils): I don't see any reason for xargs to fail here; it doesn't even see the "2>&1" redirection as the shell is evaluating this. In effect, this should be identical to
echo a | /usr/local/bin/xargs > /dev/null 2> /dev/null So the reason could be a bug in your shell, or the file /dev/null (which is usually a special character device to discard any input, or still xargs. You could run xargs under investigation of a tool like 'strace' (which I don't know whether it is available on MacOS) to see a bit more what happens: echo a | strace -o xargs.trace /usr/bin/xargs > /dev/null 2>&1 ; echo $? The output in 'xargs.trace' would be quite interesting. Thanks & have a nice day, Berny _______________________________________________________ Reply to this item at: <http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?49466> _______________________________________________ Message sent via/by Savannah http://savannah.gnu.org/