Ubuntu – How to stop gedit (and other programs) from outputting GTK warnings and the like in the terminal

geditgtk

I am running the awesome window manager on trusty after having upgraded from raring. My desktop environment intentionally does not have all the Gnome / Freedesktop daemons running — I don't want them.

When I execute gedit from a terminal like this:

gedit file

It outputs messages like this all over my terminal whenever I hit enter or save or on various other occasions:

(gedit:5700): Gtk-WARNING **: Calling Inhibit failed: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.gnome.SessionManager was not provided by any .service files

I understand the meaning of this warning and I have decided that it doesn't matter to me.

How can I turn off this kind of warning? By "turn off", I don't mean any of these or similar workarounds:

  • piping the output of gedit into /dev/null
  • writing a wrapper script that pipes the output of gedit into /dev/null
  • creating an alias that pipes the output of gedit into /dev/null

These workarounds are not acceptable as they have to be applied individually to each Gnome application — gedit is not the only one that likes to mess up the terminal.

Best Answer

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"
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