Suppressing load messages (was: batch mode)

[Joel J. Adamson]

Brendan Halpin <brendan.halpin@ul.ie> writes:

> Can I hijack the thread to ask if there is a way of suppressing the

No, you may not ;)

> "Loading" and related start-up messages when using the
> #!/usr/bin/emacs --script convention?
>
> At present this:
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
> #!/usr/bin/emacs --script
> (princ "Hello World!\n")
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> generates the following output:
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
> brendan@annacotty:/tmp$ ./hw.el 
> Loading 00debian-vars...
> Loading /etc/emacs-snapshot/site-start.d/50auctex.el (source)...
> Loading /usr/share/emacs/23.0.50/site-lisp/auctex.el (source)...
> Loading /usr/share/emacs/23.0.50/site-lisp/preview-latex.el (source)...
> Loading /etc/emacs/site-start.d/50dictionaries-common.el (source)...
> Skipping dictionaries-common setup for emacs-snapshot
> Loading /etc/emacs/site-start.d/50gcl.el (source)...
> Loading /etc/emacs/site-start.d/50slime.el (source)...
> Loading /usr/share/emacs-snapshot/site-lisp/slime/slime-autoloads...

This is all STDERR, i.e. the *Messages* buffer.  If you redirect STDERR
or STDOUT, you can suppress the messages, or capture the output in a file.

For example, "hello 2</dev/null"
,----
| 
| /home/joel/lisp/el: ZShell> cat hello.el
| #!/usr/bin/emacs --script
| (message "this is garbage!\n")
| (princ "Hello, Is it me you're looking for?\n")
| 
| /home/joel/lisp/el: ZShell> ./hello.el 
| this is garbage!
| 
| Hello, Is it me you're looking for?
| /home/joel/lisp/el: ZShell> ./hello.el 2</dev/null
| Hello, Is it me you're looking for?
`----

There ya go.

The real question you should be asking is why emacs is loading all that
crap when you're using the --script option.  Who's in charge of your
site-start.el?

> Adding options like -q and --no-site-file to the bang line don't seem to
> have any effect, and this makes Emacs unattractive for small scripts. 

Only if all you want is STDOUT.  If you want to use 'emacs --script' for
non-interactive editing a la sed and awk, then it's perfect: load those
files into buffers, edit them and save them.

Joel

-- 
Joel J. Adamson
Biostatistician
Pediatric Psychopharmacology Research Unit
Massachusetts General Hospital
Boston, MA  02114
(617) 643-1432
(303) 880-3109

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