Ubuntu – Gdk Gtk warnings and errors from the command line

This error indicates that the software is using valid GTK library calls with a newer version of the GTK library. Sometimes during software development it is desirable to get rid of the, "old way", to do things while maintaining backwards compatibility. This is accomplished by marking the undesired calls deprecated. This tells the developer that their code is valid in this release, but in the future their code will need to be updated to work with a new version of the library, possibly many releases down the road.

In this case, GTK wants to be more strict about including units on dimensions. It tells the developer that GTK is assuming the units are pixels, which is the exact assumption that the software developer made in the first place.

Not using units is deprecated. Assuming 'px'.

That is a long and very complicated way of saying that these warnings are for the developers of the icon-theme, and do not reflect actual run-time problems.

Using the Ubuntu software repositories, you will not be given incompatible programs and libraries.

First, I also find it annoying that these warnings show up on an out-of-the-box Ubuntu, with no "proper" method to disable them which I could find (it seems that the most common "solution" is either to install gir1.2-gtksource-3.0 which doesn't seem to work since it's already installed, or to ignore them - but I want to suppress them completely since they just make my terminal noisy).

I came up with the following code which so far seems to behave exactly how I'd expect it to, and is based on the answer by TuKsn, but enhances it a bit to:

• Work by default (gedit ...) without needing to use F12 or some other shortcut (to invoke unfiltered use /usr/bin/gedit ...).
• Displays the entered command name when it terminates as a background task.

Can still be generalized a bit, but for now, if you need the same treatment for other commands, duplicate the gedit() function for each other command name which needs the same filter.

# solution adapted from: http://askubuntu.com/questions/505594
# TODO: use a list of warnings instead of cramming all of them to a single grep.
# TODO: generalize gedit() to allow the same treatment for several commands
#       without duplicating the function with only a different name
# output filter. takes: name_for_history some_command [arguments]
# the first argument is required both for history, but also when invoking to bg
# such that it shows Done <name> ... instead of e.g. Done /usr/bin/gedit ...
suppress-gnome-warnings() {
    # $1 is the name which should appear on history but is otherwise unused.
    historyName=$1
    shift

    if [ -n "$*" ]; then
        # write the real command to history without the prefix
        # syntax adapted from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4827690
        history -s "$historyName ${@:2}"

        # catch the command output
        errorMsg=$( $* 2>&1 )

        # check if the command output contains not a (one of two) GTK-Warnings
        if ! $(echo $errorMsg | grep -q 'Gtk-WARNING\|connect to accessibility bus'); then
            echo $errorMsg
        fi
    fi
}
gedit() {
  suppress-gnome-warnings $FUNCNAME $(which $FUNCNAME) $@
}

And a better version (way smaller, fully generic, no need to rewrite history since invoked as is, and better for filtering per line rather than the whole output):

# generates a function named $1 which:
# - executes $(which $1) [with args]
# - suppresses output lines which match $2
# e.g. adding: _supress echo "hello\|world"
# will generate this function:
# echo() { $(which echo) "$@" 2>&1 | tr -d '\r' | grep -v "hello\|world"; }
# and from now on, using echo will work normally except that lines with
# hello or world will not show at the output
# to see the generated functions, replace eval with echo below
# the 'tr' filter makes sure no spurious empty lines pass from some commands
_supress() {
  eval "$1() { \$(which $1) \"\$@\" 2>&1 | tr -d '\r' | grep -v \"$2\"; }"
}

_supress gedit          "Gtk-WARNING\|connect to accessibility bus"
_supress gnome-terminal "accessibility bus\|stop working with a future version"
_supress firefox        "g_slice_set_config"