[wplug] unwanted messages on console?

[Jonathan Billings]

On Jul 3, 2007, at 9:04 PM, Zach wrote:

> Some applications like amsn spew TONS of explanatory messages onto my
> consone (gnome-terminal or xterm). Is there something I can put in my
> .bashrc or .bash_profile or another way to prevent these messages from
> being displayed? I only want fatal errors to be displayed.

For the most part, these messages being sent to the console are sent  
to STDERR or STDOUT.  You could always run the programs with their  
STDERR and STDOUT redirected to a file or program that selects only  
errors you're interested in.

The methods of redirecting STDERR and STDOUT depend on the shell  
you're using.  Read the appropriate man page for your shell for more  
information.

In bash, for example, to redirect STDERR to ~/stderr.log and STDOUT  
to ~/stdout.log, do this:

% buggyprogram > ~/stdout.log 2> stderr.log &

Unfortunately, most of the offending programs don't have different  
channels of error reporting, everything from mild warnings to dire  
forecasts of failure are on STDERR.

--
Jonathan Billings <billings at negate.org>