[rt-users] Suppressing method error messages

[Mike Friedman]

On Fri, 22 Oct 2004 at 21:31 (+0400), Ruslan U. Zakirov wrote:

> Mike Friedman wrote:
>> Is there an easy way, in a perl script, to suppress error messages written
>> by RT methods to STDERR?  For example, inside a loop, I have something
>> like this:
>>
>>   $TicketNumber = $TicketObj->Load($i);
>>   next unless (defined $TicketNumber);

> Why don't you RT::Tickets object instead?

I'm using an RT::Ticket object, $TicketObj is just a loop variable whose
value is such an object.  I need the RT::Ticket->Load method in order to
load a specific ticket number(*).  (I don't see a Load method in
RT::Tickets, only in RT::Ticket).

(*) Because the purpose of this script is to run through a range of
tickets looking only for those that have status 'deleted'.  Which means I
can't use LimitStatus, for example, because it won't return deleted
tickets.

Looking in the source for Ticket_Overlay.pm, I see where it is writing out
error messages.  It's those messages I want to suppress.  The docs say
that if the specified ticket number doesn't exist, 'undef' is returned,
which is true and that's all I need.  I don't want an error message to
appear;  I'll just terminate my loop silently in that case.

As it happens, I have found a workaraound, using perl facilities.  I dup
the STDERR filehandle, save its destination, temporarily open STDERR as
/dev/null and then reset the original destination for STDERR when I am no
longer using Ticket->Load.  But this approach could get ugly in other
scripts, where I might be writing my own error messages even as I'm also
using the Ticket->Load method.

Mike

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Mike Friedman                             System and Network Security
mikef at ack.Berkeley.EDU                    2484 Shattuck Avenue
1-510-642-1410                            University of California at Berkeley
http://ack.Berkeley.EDU/~mikef            http://security.berkeley.edu
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