title: What does &> do in bash?
body: <p>I was looking at pre-commit hook and discovered the following line because I was wondering why I always got an empy file called <code>1</code> in my directory after doing a commit.</p>
  
  <pre><code>git status 2&amp;&gt;1 &gt; /dev/null
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I believe the intent was to write the following, and I corrected it.</p>
  
  <pre><code>git status 2&gt;&amp;1 &gt; /dev/null
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>However, I was curious about what the following syntax does exactly, so I looked up the man page.</p>
  
  <pre><code>git status 2&amp;&gt;1
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Here is the man page.</p>
  
  <pre><code>  Redirecting Standard Output and Standard Error
        This  construct allows both the standard output (file descriptor 1) and
        the standard error output (file descriptor 2) to be redirected  to  the
        file whose name is the expansion of word.
  
        There  are  two  formats  for  redirecting standard output and standard
        error:
  
               &amp;&gt;word
        and
               &gt;&amp;word
  
        Of the two forms, the first is preferred.  This is semantically equiva‐
        lent to
  
               &gt;word 2&gt;&amp;1
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>However, this man page implies that the two are equivalent, which does not seem to be the case.</p>
  
  <p>Can someone clarify the man page and explain exactly what is happening with this syntax?</p>