GUI applications report warnings when started from within a terminal emulator

This document (7006747) is provided subject to the disclaimer at the end of this document.

Environment

SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 Service Pack 3
SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11
SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 Service Pack 1
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 Service Pack 3
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 Service Pack 1

Situation

GUI applications report warnings when started from within a terminal emulator. To illustrate this with an example:

smt:~ # yelp&

[1] 4901

smt:~ #

(yelp:4901): Yelp-WARNING **: Failed to load config file: No such file or directory

(yelp:4901): Yelp-WARNING **: Yelper initialization failed for 0x947800


WARNING: Unknown element MultipleArgs: false

WARNING: Unknown element MultipleArgs: false

WARNING: Unknown element InitialPreference: 7

WARNING: Unknown element InitialPreference: 7

WARNING: Unknown element InitialPreference: 7

WARNING: Unknown element InitialPreference: 8

WARNING: Unknown element InitialPreference: 1

WARNING: Unknown element InitialPreference: 9

WARNING: Unknown element InitialPreference: 7

WARNING: Unknown element InitialPreference: 9

WARNING: Unknown element StartupNotification: false

[further warnings elided for the sake of brevity]

In this example, the "yelp" program is started, and outputs several warning messages to the shell session it was started from.

Resolution

Warnings such as the above and similar do not indicate a general issue with the program, and can be ignored by the user.

Additional Information

While not a problem in itself, the "noisy" console output of the program may sometimes be undesirable. To avoid it, use shell I/O redirection when starting the program:

smt:~ # yelp > /dev/null 2>&1 &

[1] 4964

smt:~ #

In the above example, both standard output and standard error have been redirected to /dev/null. As a result of this, the flood of warning messages has been prevented.

Disclaimer

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