Can git operate in "silent mode"?

Question

You can use --quiet or -q, which can also be used for other Git commands:

git commit --quiet
git push --quiet

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.

Using &> /dev/null at the end gives you a completely silent git command output.

git fetch origin master &> /dev/null

Note that even with --quiet, a git fetch (which triggers a git gc) would generate some output.
That is because of the git gc part of the git fetch.

Not anymore, starting git 2.1.1 (Sept 2014): see commit 6fceed3bea59d747c160972c67663e8b8c281229 from Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy (pclouds)

fetch: silence git-gc if --quiet is given

builtin/fetch.c:

argv_array_pushl(&argv_gc_auto, "gc", "--auto", NULL);
if (verbosity < 0)
argv_array_push(&argv_gc_auto, "--quiet");
run_command_v_opt(argv_gc_auto.argv, RUN_GIT_CMD);