Every time starting the machine, I run the following program:
$ cat start.sh
#! /bin/bash
google-chrome &> /dev/null &
lantern &> /dev/null &
xdg-open . &> /dev/null &
emacs &> /dev/null &
code ~/Programs/ &> /dev/null &
xdg-open ~/Reference/topic_regex.md &> /dev/null &
Cumbersome &> /dev/null &...
How could I shorten the logic?
The part &> /dev/null means output redirection. You can redirect multiple commands to the same file by grouping them into a block:
#! /bin/bash
{
google-chrome &
lantern &
xdg-open . &
emacs &
code ~/Programs/ &
xdg-open ~/Reference/topic_regex.md &
} &> /dev/null
The same thing, however, cannot be used to start individual commands in the background (&). Putting & after the block would mean running the whole block as a single script in the background.
I wrote a function and put it into my .bashrc to run
things detached from my terminal:
detach ()
{
( "$@" &> /dev/null & )
}
... and then:
detach google-chrome
detach xdg-open ~/Reference/topic_regex.md
And because I'm lazy, I also wrote a shortcut for xdg-open:
xo ()
{
for var in "$@"; do
detach xdg-open "$var";
done
}
Because xdg-open expects exactly one argument, the function xo iterates
over all given arguments and calls xdg-open for each one separately.
This allows for:
detach google-chrome
xo . ~/Reference/topic_regex.md
You could redirect the output for all subsequent commands with
exec 1>/dev/null
exec 2>/dev/null
I created a special file like /dev/null with a shorter path to shorten the redirection. I used /n as the new file’s path:
sudo mknod -m 0666 /n c 1 3
This way you can shorten the individual lines to e.g.:
google-chrome &>/n &
Source: How to create /dev/null?
You could create a loop and give it the commands as arguments:
for i in google-chrome "xdg-open ." "code ~/Programs/"; do
$i &
done &>/dev/null
Note that this way exactly as with the subshell approach with curly braces it’s possible to sum up the outputs and redirect all of them at once.