How do I suspend output of commands and tools that sometimes utter unwanted output? I know that I can always pipe to null or some such thing, but is there a simpler more elegant (i.e. accepted) practice?

Some commands and tools have options for silent mode. However the accepted practice is to send stderr to /dev/null.

I really have to learn to phrase more carefully. I didn't mean to imply error output, but really just the FYI kind of messages that might complement the actual work or output of a tool. Something like "...done. 5 instances found", where the work was desired, but the chit chat wasn't.

If I remember correctly, in DOS this was accomplished by preceding the statement with an apostrophe. Now it's done by "echo off".

Thanks for the reply, btw.

Some commands have quiet/verbose mode, check what commands are being used. The tradition is that tools are quiet unless told to be verbose.

What command is it that is outputing the unwanted blurb?

A process normally has two outputs to screen: stdout (standard out), and stderr (standard error).

Normally informational messages go to sdout, and errors and alerts go to stderr.

You can turn off stdout for a command by doing

and turn off stderr by doing:

If you want both off, you can do:

(The 2>&1 says send stderr to the same place as stdout.)

Turning around the notes about the "-v" for verbose convention; some commands have a "-q" (quiet) option, eg. "grep -q".