Arch Linux

pacman -Su --quiet --print | sed 1,2d

It's an easy workaround but a '--really-quiet' option would be fine too :-)

Why would you be using -Su and not -Qu?

-Su is better for scripting. Is there a way to show just the version numbers with 'pacman -Q' other than

pacman -Qu | cut -d " " -f 2

or some similar awking?

As Karol hinted at, --print-format does not work with -Qu - actually it does not work with -Q at all, maybe this should be a separate bug?

Also, -Qu will only give already installed packages that need to be upgraded, while -Su will show all packages that will be installed upon --sysupgrade. This therefore includes new packages that could be installed if a currently installed package has any new dependencies upon upgrade.

To elaborate a little on some possible use cases;

A trivial example is shown in a thread started by Karol (https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=103714) where a simple script shows the upgradeable packages and their versions. While similar functionality can be achieved using -Qu instead of -Su, in post #18 I mention the issue of new dependencies.

A non-trivial example is where a user would want to use an external download accelerator such as aria2 to download the packages for an upgrade with:
# pacman -Sup --print-format "%l" | aria2c -i - -d "$CACHEDIR" && pacman -Su
In this case aria queues and concurrently downloads several packages at once, thus similar functionality can not be achieved with XferCommand in pacman.conf.
Note that currently the aforementioned ":: Starting full system upgrade..." lines need to be filtered out before aria.
In this example listing the new dependencies is much more critical than in the first example, and thus highlights the need to use -Su over -Qu.

I think it would suffice to print the messages to stderr rather than stdout. Scripts could redirect them to /dev/null.

+1 for stderr. That would make a lot of sense when using pacman for scripting. For example, it would also allow the important messages from install scripts to be redirected separately from "(1/10) upgrading foo" and emailed to a sysadmin.

Status?

pacman 4.0.1 is still pretty chatty:

# pacman -Suq 2>/dev/null
:: Starting full system upgrade...
there is nothing to do

Non error output will not be printed to stderr, so a different approach will be needed.

There's no difference between
# pacman -Su
:: Starting full system upgrade...
there is nothing to do
and
# pacman -Suq
:: Starting full system upgrade...
there is nothing to do

It would be nice if the '-q' switch magically kept pacman quiet by not printing these lines.

Thanks for restating the bug report. We would be entirely lost without your helpful comment...

Just to expand on "Why would you be using -Su and not -Qu?", because they are different.  FS#41223  exposes one difference. (-Su respects the pacman config while -Qu does not.)

-Qu now print [Ignored] beside ignored updated.