ug+ : many warning messages to stderr for problems with PDFs about ugrep HOT 3 CLOSED

Adding this to the filter() method at ugrep.cpp:3795 suppresses error messages sent by the filter to stderr when ugrep option -q or -s is used:

            // -q or -q: suppress error messages sent to stderr by the filter command
            if (flag_quiet || flag_no_messages)
            {
              int dev_null = open("/dev/null", O_WRONLY);
              if (dev_null >= 0)
              {
                dup2(dev_null, STDERR_FILENO);
                close(dev_null);
              }
            }

That needs to be added right after this part:

            // dup the writing end of the pipe to stdout
            dup2(fd[1], STDOUT_FILENO);
            close(fd[1]);

from ugrep.

These messages are generated by the pdftotext tool that is executed as a filter with --filter=pdf:pdftotext. It has a -q switch to turn error messages off, but that is not done with ug+ -q because ug+ is a script.

This should work for you by using ug instead of ug+:

$ ug --filter='pdf:pdftotext -q % -' PATTERN [FILES...]

Perhaps add -tpdf to only search PDF files.

Or send the pdftotext error messages to dev/null on all *nix systems with 2>/dev/null on the command line:

$ ug+ PATTERN [FILES...] 2>/dev/null

Error messages can be useful when PDFs have issues, but we could suppress them perhaps with -q in the ug+ script itself. A more advanced way of suppressing is to fork pdftotext as usual but then send stderr to /dev/null when ugrep option -q or -s is specified. Don't know what's best or what people want.

from ugrep.

Fixed in v5.1.2

from ugrep.