Re: Bikeshed: --quiet option

On 1 Aug 2002, Scott Lamb <slamb@slamb.org> wrote:
> Greg Hudson wrote:
> > * "Silence is golden": In some cases, like rsync or scp, the -q
> > switch is equivalent to redirecting stdout to /dev/null. The idea
> > is to turn a noisy command into something more like a traditional
> > Unix utility, which never writes anything to stdout unless that's
> > its primary function.
>
> I never understood the point of these - redirecting to /dev/null works
> just as well and is standard across all software. Unless you print
> errors on stdout, but that would be dumb.

I think the case is a program that produces "data" to stdout, and
"metadata" to stderr. Perhaps by default it produces warnings to
stderr as well, but --silent will make it shut up unless something
horrible happens, in which case you do want something on stderr.

For example, gzip works this way.

I think it's quite nice and consistent.

-- 
Martin 
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