This program is used to perform the emerge in Gentoo Linux with pretty output.

Gentoo Forum page

How it works

The script first checks if the emerge process will proceed properly, by doing a emerge --pretend. If the emerge process was successful, then the script launches emerge via

emerge -q <rest of the command line options> 2>&1 > output_file &

The program then repeatedly checks the output of emerge in output_file for updates and accordingly provides an updated terminal output.

Usage

The script should be run simply as if you were running emerge. To facilitate a nice output as shown in the screenshot, it is recommended to not use emerge options such as -c, -C, --sync. The script itself takes no arguments other than -h or --help and passes all the rest of the arguments to emerge.

If the script detects any unsupported arguments, then it simply executes emerge directly, bypassing all the other setup in the script.

This is a bash script and its compatibility with other shells is unknown. It will definitely produce tons of errors if called as some other shell. So you can either

1. make the script executable (chmod 755 quietemerge) and then just run it as quietemerge, or
2. run it as bash quietemerge.

In order to temporarily override the settings present in the config file, prepend the variable with an underscore _ and provide it as an environment variable. An example where I want to override the config file setting temporarily, and/or provide a temporary setting:

_DELAY=2 _MOUNT_TMPFS=1 quietemerge -a eselect 

Examples

quietemerge -1 glibc vim
quietemerge --resume
quietemerge -auDvN --jobs=3 --load-average=4 --keep-going world

Download

You can download the script from the download tab at the top of the page. I have not put it in subversion or mercurial. This is now hosted on git. All the versions have been added retroactively.

Please rename the downloaded file to quietemerge after downloading it.

Installation

Copy the script to some directory which is in $PATH of root. Personally, I have it installed in /usr/local/bin.

Dependencies

Till version 20100407: The script depends on app-portage/genlop.

From version 20110422: No dependency on genlop.

Configuration

The script creates a configuration file $HOME/.config/quietemerge.config. It is not mandatory to modify that file,- I have tried to keep the defaults sane. However, if you want to mount tmpfs on to /var/tmp/portage or run your favourite config update utility after emerge is over, I would suggest looking at the configuration file.

zsh completion configuration

If you use zsh, then you can perform the following steps to enable command line autocompletion of quietemerge in zsh.

New instructions for zsh-completion

1. Install zsh-completion:

emerge zsh-completion

2. Add the following line to the beginning of your $HOME/.zshrc

[[ -f /etc/zsh/zprofile ]] && . /etc/zsh/zprofile

3. Enable the zsh completion:

echo "compdef quietemerge=emerge" >> $HOME/.zshrc
exec zsh

Old instructions for zsh-completion

1. Install zsh-completion:

emerge zsh-completion

2. Add the following line to the beginning of your $HOME/.zshrc

[[ -f /etc/zsh/zprofile ]] && . /etc/zsh/zprofile

3. Create a directory /etc/zsh/zsh-functions
4. Enable this new zsh completion path:

echo "fpath=( /etc/zsh/zsh-functions \$fpath )" >> /etc/zsh/zprofile

5. Copy _quietemerge to /etc/zsh/zsh-functions
6. Run the commands

env-update
exec zsh

Bash completion configuration

Command line completion of quietemerge in bash can be achieved by executing the following steps.

1. Install and configure gentoo-bashcomp

emerge gentoo-bashcomp
eselect bashcomp enable --global base
eselect bashcomp enable --global gentoo

2. Add the following two lines to the end of your $HOME/.bashrc

[[ -f /etc/profile.d/bash-completion.sh ]] && source /etc/profile.d/bash-completion.sh
complete -o filenames -F _emerge quietemerge

3. Run the command

exec bash

Screenshot