Is it possible to make the initial startup of a distrobox silent when run through an export?

[TiZ-HugLife]

Hi there.

I would like to use distrobox and its exports to ensure that certain utilities that are not commonly packaged with distributions anymore are always present, because my own automations rely on them. Namely, tools like devilspie2, wmctrl, and xdotool. Those utilities keep me on Xorg, as well. Desktop-agnostic automation utilities are not a priority for anyone in the Wayland world.

This generally works, but there is a bit of a hitch. When you start a distrobox for the first time, there's a bunch of output about starting it up. And this goes for when you use exported binaries as well. These messages do at least seem to go to standard error instead of standard output. So if I want to parse the output of wmctrl -l or xdotool, I probably don't have to worry about the output being polluted, but it could still make some of my scripts noisy. I can redirect stderr to null, but that would affect not just distrobox's output, but also the output of whatever I'm trying to run in it.

What can I do to prevent this output from appearing? I imagine that one approach would be to make sure that the distrobox starts up before anything that would want to use it runs. There is a distrobox stop command, but there's not a distrobox start command. That said, it's trivial enough to start it ahead of time by just doing distrobox enter -n name -- true. And that is probably what I should do anyways; with podman, it takes long enough to enter a container as it is. But I do think it would be worth finding a way to silence those messages in exports, or at the very least put the messages somewhere else.

Thanks for your time. 🙂