Question

Is it possible to execute any git command in “silent” mode? For instance, can i say “git push origin” and see nothing displayed on the screen?

I suppose i can redirect IO to /dev/null (works fine), but .. does git allow something like this naturally?

Below is a quick script that does automatic EOD commit, used when i need to catch the train and don’t want to leave code on my local computer

  1 clear
  2
  3 cd
  4 cd repo/active
  5
  6 for i in *
  7 do
  8   cd $i
  9   echo "Pushing " $i
 10   git add . -A >> /dev/null 
 11   git commit -a -m "EOD automatic commit" >> /dev/null 
 12   git push origin >> /dev/null 
 13   echo
 14   cd ..
 15 done

Please let me know.

Answer 1

Redirecting output to /dev/null seems like a natural way of doing it to me. Although I have in the past defined a quiet_git shell function like this for use in cron jobs:

quiet_git() {
    stdout=$(tempfile)
    stderr=$(tempfile)

    if ! git "$@" </dev/null >$stdout 2>$stderr; then
        cat $stderr >&2
        rm -f $stdout $stderr
        exit 1
    fi

    rm -f $stdout $stderr
}

This will suppress stdout and stderr, unless the git command fails. It’s not pretty; in fact the stdout file is ignored and it should just redirect that to /dev/null. Works, though. And then you can just do “quiet_git push” etc. later on in the script.