Question

Every once in a while I have to fire up a GUI program from my terminal session to do something. It usually is Chrome to display some HTML file are some task alike.
These programs however throw warnings all over the place and it can actually become ridiculous to write anything so I always wanted to redirect stderr/stdout to /dev/null.

While ($PROGRAM &) &>/dev/null seems okay I decided to create a simple Bash function for it so I don’t have to repeat myself everytime.

So for now my solution is something like this:

#
# silly little function
#
gui ()
{
  if [ $# -gt 0 ] ; then
    ($@ &) &>/dev/null
  else
    echo "missing argument"
  fi
}

#
# silly little example
#
alias google-chrome='gui google-chrome'

So what I’m wondering about is:

• Is there a way without an endless list of aliases that’s still snappy?
• Are there different strategies to accomplish this?
• Do other shells offer different solutions?

In asking these questions I want to point out that your strategies and solutions might deviate substantially form mine. Redirecting output to /dev/null and aliasing it was the only way I know but there might be entirely different ways that are more efficient.

Hence this question 🙂

Answer 1

As others have pointed in the comments, I think the real problem is a way to distinguish between gui vs. non-gui apps on the commandline. As such, the cleanest way I could think of is to put this part of your script:

  #!/bin/bash

  if [ $# -gt 0 ] ; then
    ($@ &) &>/dev/null
  else
    echo "missing argument"
  fi

into a file called gui, then chmod +x it and put it in your ~/bin/ (make sure ~/bin is in your $PATH). Now you can launch gui apps with:

`gui google-chrome`

on the prompt.

Alternatively, you can do the above, then make use of bind:

bind 'RETURN: "\e[1~gui \e[4~\n"'

This will allow you to just do:

google-chrome

on the prompt and it would automatically append gui before google-chrome

Or, you can bind the above action to F12 instead of RETURN with

bind '"\e[24~": "\e[1~gui \e[4~\n"'

To separate what you want launched with gui vs. non-gui.

More discussion on binding here and here.

These alternatives offer you a way out of endless aliases; a mix of:

• Putting gui in your ~/bin/, and
• Binding use of gui to F12 as shown above

seems the most ideal (albeit hacky) solution.

---

Update – @Enno Weichert’s Resultant Solution:

Rounding this solution out …

This would take care of aliases (in a somewhat whacky way though) and different escape encodings (in a more pragmatic rather than exhaustive way).

Put this in $(HOME)/bin/quiet

#!/bin/bash -i

if [ $# -gt 0 ] ; then
  # Expand if $1 is an alias
  if [ $(alias -p | awk -F "[ =]" '{print $2}' | grep -x $1) > 0 ] ; then
    set -- $(alias $1 | awk -F "['']" '{print $2}') "${@:2}"
  fi
  ($@ &) &>/dev/null
else
  echo "missing argument"
fi

And this in $(HOME)/.inputrc

#
# Bind prepend `quiet ` to [ALT][RETURN]
#
# The condition is of limited use actually but serves to seperate
# TTY instances from Gnome Terminal instances for me.
# There might very well be other VT emulators that ID as `xterm`
# but use totally different escape codes!
#
$if $term=xterm
  "\e\C-j": "\eOHquiet \eOF\n"
$else
  "\e\C-m": "\e[1~quiet \e[4~\n"
$endif