[Bug 2325] New: excessive and unquietable stderr chatter

[bugzilla-daemon at mindrot.org]

https://bugzilla.mindrot.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2325

            Bug ID: 2325
           Summary: excessive and unquietable stderr chatter
           Product: Portable OpenSSH
           Version: -current
          Hardware: All
                OS: All
            Status: NEW
          Severity: minor
          Priority: P5
         Component: ssh-keygen
          Assignee: unassigned-bugs at mindrot.org
          Reporter: schmiddy at gmail.com

I maintain some code (using cronic, see http://habilis.net/cronic/ )
which is sensitive to any noise generated on stderr, treating it as a
possible error. One culprit causing false alarms is ssh-keygen, which
generates these two messages from around line 1245 of ssh-keygen.c:

fprintf(stderr, "%s updated.\n", identity_file);
fprintf(stderr, "Original contents retained as %s\n", old);

I believe such use of stderr is inconsistent not only with generally
accepted use of stderr elsewhere, but with the rest of the OpenSSH
codebase. Other non-error messages in that file (e.g. "%s: generating
new host keys: ") seem fine with being sent to stdout, and similar
diagnostic messages in that file also respect the "quiet" flag, which I
would find helpful.

I noticed some other inconsistencies in ssh-keygen.c as well. For
example, this bit (line 888) surely should go to stderr instead of
stdout:

if (invalid) {
        printf("%s is not a public key file.\n", identity_file);
        exit(1);
}

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