Screaming into the Black Hole of Logs

A journey through silence, memory, and the filesystem

The Linux filesystem is like a galaxy, with every directory a planet, each with its own life and purpose.

Linux File System

/home — a thriving colony where our files live and grow.
/etc — a vault of secrets, blueprints for the system’s survival.
/var/log — the great archives, recording every whisper of the past.

Each one exists to hold something Data. Configuration. Memory. They are not just directories, they are stations of meaning. A place where information is stored, recalled, and trusted. Like satellites orbiting purpose, these worlds keep history alive. They remember who ran the commands, what changed, and why it mattered. They give structure to chaos. Context to code. Continuity to time.

But not all places in this galaxy serve memory.

Some were not made to remember. Some were built to forget. They do not preserve. They do not log. They do not care. They simply take and return nothing.. Before we dive deeper, we must understand the streams that carry our signals:

stdin: standard input - our command, our intent. Simply, what we type.
stdout: standard output - the system’s voice, the message returned. stderr: standard error - the red alerts, the cries for help. A warning we’d rather not see. The banner we ignore until it’s too late.

The numeric file descriptors for stdin, stdout, stderr:

• 0 = stdin
• 1 = stdout
• 2 = stderr

Most of the time, we monitor them all. But there are moments… when we choose silence. When the noise becomes too much. When we need a place to send the chaos - not to fix it, not to understand it, but to let it disappear.

That’s where /dev/null begins. It’s not a planet. Not a station. It is a singularity.

A black hole hidden in the Linux galaxy. No logs. No echoes. No light.

It doesn’t crash. It doesn’t complain. It simply consumes.

Other directories serve life and continuity. But /dev/null is the opposite - the absence of memory. An endpoint where the filesystem stops listening.

And when the time comes… when the errors get too loud, when STTDR begins to cry out for attention, I open the hatch and type:

stderr 2>dev/null

In that moment, we don’t just redirect an error. We exile it. We send it beyond the event horizon, past the point where logs are written, where debugging ends, into the place where nothing returns.

No trace. No confirmation.

Out there, beyond the kernel’s reach, those warnings drift alone, screaming into the black hole of logs.

And we move on. Because some errors aren’t meant to be fixed. Some are meant to disappear.

The Search That Was Never Silent

We've spoken of warnings. Of signals. Of cries from the system.

Now… let’s see this in action.

We launch a search across the filesystem:

find / -name "*.conf"

The command works. It begins its sweep - like a probe scanning uncharted territory. But almost instantly:

find: ‘/proc/1/fd/3’: Permission denied  
find: ‘/root’: Permission denied  

The system doesn’t fail. It warns. You receive a cascade of stderr - not to stop you, but to remind you: there are places you cannot go.

It’s the system whispering: “You’re not meant to see this.”

And yet, the search continues. Through noise. Through closed doors. It returns what it can - but leaves you in the storm of warnings.

Now watch what happens when we redirect the warnings into the void:

find / -name "*.conf" 2> /dev/null

Same probe. Same search. But now, the warnings fall into silence - absorbed by /dev/null. No protests. No permissions. Just the results that matter.

As if the universe still refused to answer… but we stopped listening

The final result

/etc/ssh/sshd_config

At last, we have reached.

Not everything needs to be remembered to be meaningful. Some journeys are better when the noise is silenced. Some discoveries are best made… in peace.