How to suppress warning and error messages in Azure CLI
In Azure CLI some commands can return errors and warning messages, which can cause troubles on your script, so check out how to suppress it
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How to suppress warnings on Azure CLI
Command group is in preview and under development
In some cases the CLI used can be under development and show the message: Command group is in preview and under development. Reference and support levels: [https://aka.ms/CLI_refstatus](https://aka.ms/CLI_refstatus)
At the moment that I am writing this post, the az devops CLI variable-group for example is always returning the message above, which have been causing troubles and breaking my pester tests :)
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Quiet mode on Azure CLI
For Azure CLI, the simplest way to make the commands “quiet” is by adding the global parameter --only-show-errors in your command. **It will suppress only the warnings **and keep the message in case you have any errors during the execution.
So in our example for az pipelines variable-group our command will be like this:
ash az pipelines variable-group list --org $organization -p $project --only-show-errors
How to suppress errors on Azure CLI
In some cases, you may need to also suppress the errors during your script execution and there is one more option for it. I would recommend this approach only if you really do not care if something went wrong during your script execution.
Redirecting the console output STDERR
A common scenario to redirect streams is when the symbol > is used to write the output of the command in a file. It redirects the standard output - STDOUT - to the file added as a parameter.
In the situation that is necessary to suppress the errors, we need to redirect the output of the error stream — STDERR.
To do it you simply need to add 2>nul after the CLI command, which means that the second stream (STDERR) will be redirected to null .
So in our example for az pipelines variable-group the command will be:
ash az pipelines variable-group list --org $organization -p $project 2>nul
Conclusion
Although this topic looks simple, sometimes it’s not so easy to find this information in the documentation, especially regarding the error suppressing topic, and also the comparison of both approaches is not documented.
I grouped both, how to suppress warnings and errors in one place, so would be to choose which option suits better in each scenario.
References
Redirecting error from Command Prompt — Visual C++ | Microsoft Docs