Redirecting stdout to "nothing" in python

Question

I have a large project consisting of sufficiently large number of modules, each printing something to the standard output. Now as the project has grown in size, there are large no. of print statements printing a lot on the std out which has made the program considerably slower.

So, I now want to decide at runtime whether or not to print anything to the stdout. I cannot make changes in the modules as there are plenty of them. (I know I can redirect the stdout to a file but even this is considerably slow.)

So my question is how do I redirect the stdout to nothing ie how do I make the print statement do nothing?

# I want to do something like this.
sys.stdout = None         # this obviously will give an error as Nonetype object does not have any write method.

Currently the only idea I have is to make a class which has a write method (which does nothing) and redirect the stdout to an instance of this class.

class DontPrint(object):
    def write(*args): pass

dp = DontPrint()
sys.stdout = dp

Is there an inbuilt mechanism in python for this? Or is there something better than this?

Answer 1

Cross-platform:

import os
import sys
f = open(os.devnull, 'w')
sys.stdout = f

On Windows:

f = open('nul', 'w')
sys.stdout = f

On Linux:

f = open('/dev/null', 'w')
sys.stdout = f