PAGER('/dev/null'): permission denied

Question

Setting PAGER to /dev/null as suggested through the net to prevent every command being printed in stdout issues an error under OS X 10.6:

octave:1> PAGER('/dev/null');
octave:2> 1
sh: /dev/null: Permission denied

Any way to fix this?

Answer 1

Like grawity said above, Octave is indeed expecting PAGER to be set to a program, but cat raises an error, true raises a broken pipe warning.

So, figured Octave was just piping output to PAGER, and fixed this by redirecting the output of a valid program to /dev/null:

PAGER('less > /dev/null')
PAGER('true > /dev/null')

Answer 2

The error message is shown because Octave is expecting PAGER to be set to a program that can be run and given the text as 'stdin'. The /dev/null file is obviously not a program, and it does not have the "executable" permission bot; the latter is what causes the permission error.

Try /usr/bin/cat or /usr/bin/true instead.