) to ensure that English messages are reported, so that grep -v 'Permission denied' works as intended.

If your system is configured to show localized error messages, prefix the find calls below with LC_ALL=C ( LC_ALL=C find.

> files_and_folders 2>(grep -v 'Permission denied' >&2) If your shell is bash or zsh, there's a solution that is robust while being reasonably simple, using only POSIX-compliant find features while bash itself is not part of POSIX, most modern Unix platforms come with it, making this solution widely portable: find. It may still be of interest for a cross-platform perspective and for its discussion of some advanced shell techniques in the interest of finding a solution that is as robust as possible, even though the cases guarded against may be largely hypothetical.

This answer probably goes deeper than the use case warrants, and find 2>/dev/null may be good enough in many situations.

GNU find in particular has a myriad options not available in other versions - see the currently accepted answer for one such set of options. If you wish to adapt to the specific version of find you have on your system, there may be alternative options available. This will work on any variant of Unix with any Bourne shell derivative (Bash, Korn, …) and any POSIX-compliant version of find. There are endless variations on this theme, depending on what you want to do. The final redirection could be regarded as optional at the terminal, but would be a very good idea to use it in a script so that error messages appear on standard error. The grep filters the standard output (you can decide how selective you want it to be, and may have to change the spelling depending on locale and O/S) and the final >&2 means that the surviving error messages (written to standard output) go to standard error once more. The net result is that messages written to standard error are sent down the pipe and the regular output of find is written to the file. The > files_and_folders sends standard output (but not standard error) to a file. The 2>&1 sends standard error to the same place as standard output (the pipe).

The pipe redirects standard output to the grep command and is applied first. The I/O redirection on the find command is: 2>&1 > files_and_folders |. 2>&1 > files_and_folders | grep -v 'Permission denied' >&2 If you strictly want to filter just standard error, you can use the more elaborate construction: find. 2>&1 | grep -v 'Permission denied' > files_and_folders If you really want to keep other possible errors, such as too many hops on a symlink, but not the permission denied ones, then you'd probably have to take a flying guess that you don't have many files called 'permission denied' and try: find. This hides not just the Permission denied errors, of course, but all error messages.

Terminal find file by name recursive