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 has contributed to dozens of enterprise Node.js services and has worked for a company dedicated to securing Node.js. He has spoken at several conferences on Node.js and JavaScript and is an O'Reilly published author.