Suppressing SSH MOTD Messages

There are two popular ways for supressing Message of the Day banners on SSH servers.

The first is probably the most correct, and is done on the remote server. Simply create a file named .hushlogin, and the SSH daemon should suppress the MOTD message.

touch .hushlogin

The second method might accidentally hide some SSH connection errors, but is a little more aggressive than the first, working to suppress MOTD's from servers which ignore the .hushlogin file. This is simply adding the -q argument to the ssh connection command.

ssh -q USER@SERVER

Why would someone want to suppress a MOTD message? If you are running a non-interactive command, and want to parse the results locally, this is a must.

Thomas Hunter II is a Software Engineer with 18+ years building scalable, production-grade systems. Deep expertise in Node.js, observability, and developer tooling, with a strong track record of driving architectural decisions, mentoring engineers, and improving customer facing technical documentation. Author of 5 books (including O'Reilly), certified by the OpenJS Foundation, and frequent international conference speaker.