Suppress signal output like "Abort trap: 6" in a shellscript, for a test that should crash

Question

Something helpfully outputs Abort trap: 6 when a program crashes, that is started from a bash:

$ ./crash-if-correct > /dev/null 2>&1
Abort trap: 6

For a test case that should be crashing, this creates output that looks wrong. How can this be suppressed ?

I suspect it's not the shell (in my case that's bash), because an ack 'trap:' through the bash sources revealed nothing.

Simple way to reproduce:

$ cat <<EOF > abort.c
main()
{
   abort();
}
EOF

$ cc -w -o abort abort.c
$ sh -c ./abort > /dev/null 2>&1
Abort trap: 6

Answer 1

The solution is to run the child process in a subshell :

$ cc -w -o abort abort.c
$ $(./abort)
$

This works for me on OSX.

Note that if ./abort outputs text, it will be executed

$ cat hello-abort.c
main()
{
    puts("Hello");
    abort();
}
$ cc -w -o hello-abort hello-abort.c
$ ./hello-abort
Hello
Abort trap: 6
$ $(./hello-abort)
bash: Hello: command not found                   # <== Danger
$ exec 3>&1; $(./hello-abort >&3); exec 3>&-
Hello
$

In zsh, the return value of the last command is 134. Append || true to the command to make it become 0.

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