Suppress server message in rsync

Question

When I rsync or scp from a particular server I get a rather long message telling me the rules of the server. However when I setup regular pulls, I'd like to be able to suppress those messages in my logs. Looking through the man page suggest that -q should work, but that only quiets messages from scp itself. How can I do this?

Answer 1

For rsync, it has a --no-motd you can use to suppress the motd for your script and only see the output of what rsync is transferring. It looks like it was added in rsync 3.x since I don't see that option in 2.x.

The man page lists a caveat about not using it when trying to get a listing of modules you can rsync:

--no-motd

This option affects the information that is output by the client at the start of a daemon transfer. This suppresses the message-of-the-day (MOTD) text, but it also affects the list of modules that the daemon sends in response to the "rsync host::" request (due to a limitation in the rsync protocol), so omit this option if you want to request the list of modules from the daemon.

For scp, trying touching the file ~/.hushlogin. When I scp files, I don't see the motd though but your set up might be different. The man page for login has more info:

If the file .hushlogin exists, then a "quiet" login is performed (this disables the checking of mail and the printing of the last login time and message of the day). Otherwise, if /var/log/lastlog exists, the last login time is printed (and the current login is recorded).

Answer 2

You can probably suppress the motd by redirecting STDERR to /dev/null, but that way you will miss all other error messages too.

scp src dst 2> /dev/null