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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-07T15:53:33+00:00

Even when I invoke emacs -batch (that is, batch mode without actually doing anything),

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Even when I invoke emacs -batch (that is, batch mode without actually doing anything), emacs vomits out a whole pile of messages:

$ emacs -batch
Loading 00debian-vars...
Loading /etc/emacs/site-start.d/50autoconf.el (source)...
Loading /etc/emacs/site-start.d/50cmake-data.el (source)...
Loading /etc/emacs/site-start.d/50devhelp.el (source)...
Loading /etc/emacs/site-start.d/50dictionaries-common.el (source)...
Loading debian-ispell...
Loading /var/cache/dictionaries-common/emacsen-ispell-default.el (source)...
Loading /var/cache/dictionaries-common/emacsen-ispell-dicts.el (source)...
Loading /etc/emacs/site-start.d/50psvn.el (source)...

Is there any way to silence these messages? Google hasn’t been too helpful for this.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Those are the messages that would normally show up in the *Messages* buffer, which are instead going to stderr. Here are a few ways to silence it, in increasing order of sophistication:

    • The simplest fix would be to redirect stderr, if you’re not going to use it:

      emacs -batch 2>/dev/null

    • Those messages are coming from something loaded in the site-wide initialization. If you don’t need any other functionality from your initialization files, you can try:

      emacs -batch --no-site-file ... # ignore system-wide
emacs -batch -Q ... # ignore everything

    • In theory one can achieve this via (setq force-load-messages nil), but the fact that the site-file is the one printing here means you likely can’t do it early enough.

    • advise the load function so that it is always called with NOMESSAGE. Here’s a sketch:

      (defadvice load (before quiet-loading
                   (&optional NOMESSAGE)
                   activate)
   (setq NOMESSAGE t))
(load site-run-file t)

      This should just force load to always pass t in the NOMESSAGE argument, and then loads the site-run-file, ignoring errors if no such file is present. (Note that at least on all 2 of the machines I use emacs on, there’s no site-run-file; I have no idea how common that is in the wild.)

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