Remove "Last login" message for new tabs in terminal

After some search about it I created a ~/.hushlogin file and it worked, but only for new windows. Is there a way to make it work for new tabs too?

On Mavericks, creating the empty file ~/.hushlogin removes the line “Last login”, for new windows and new tabs.

On my Mac it works.

Solution

This is running OS X 10.8.3. I haven't tested it on other versions, but so long as Terminal has the above option, then it should work.

1. In Terminal.app, go to Preferences->Settings and select the profile you're using. Go to the 'Shell' tab and under the 'Startup' heading, check 'Run command:' and enter into the box:

   login -fpql your-username /bin/bash
   

Substitute your-username with your actual Unix username. If you use a shell other than the default bash shell, replace /bin/bash with the full path to that shell (yes, even if you've already set it in Preferences->Startup.)

2. Make sure 'Run inside shell' is unchecked.

3. If you have the "Prompt before closing: Only if there are processes other than login shell and:" option selected, add "login" and "bash" to the list of processes it will not prompt for.

4. Make sure you have a ~/.bashrc file, since this will be the file bash uses on startup from now on rather than ~/.bash_profile. I just have one file reference the other using this method. You also need to be sure it sources /etc/profile.

Explanation

We want to run login with the -q option to tell it to supress the "Last login" message, even in the absence of a .hushlogin file. (As noted above, login will only look in cwd for that file, not your home directory, so you'd need a .hushlogin file in every directory you'd open a shell to, for that method to work.)

The problem is Terminal runs something like login -pfl your-username /bin/bash -c exec -la bash /usr/local/bin/bash when you create a new shell (I'm using homebrew's version of bash, hence the weird bash path at the end,) which lacks the -q flag.

Unfortunately, there's no way to directly change the arguments Terminal uses, so we just trampoline a new login session with login -pfql from Terminal's default login -pfl session. Inelegant, but it works.

We need to have the -q option and the path to bash to keep the "New windows/tabs open with: Same Working Directory" option working. If you don't care about that option, you can remove that flag and argument, and probably avoid the .bashrc stuff above.

you could just add a clear to your .bash_profile

This might be OS version dependent. On Terminal 2.3 (on 10.8), touching the file ~/.hushlogin suppresses the 'last login' message for new tabs as well as new windows. That is, it Works For Me.

Just in case it helps to work out what's going on (and in case you don't know), note that the 'last login' message is in principle coming from login(1), and not the shell. Or, more precisely, if a shell is invoked in a particular way (including starting it with the -l option), then bash will "act as if it had been invoked as a login shell" (zsh may have a similar feature, though I can't find it right now). Now, it could be that when Terminanl opens up a new tab in your OS X version, the shell is effectively simulating opening a login shell, and maybe getting this detail wrong. But if you have the 10.8 version of bash/zsh (namely 3.2.48 / 4.3.11), then I don't know what might be amiss.

Adding ~/.hushlogin is fine unless you want to open a new tab in the same folder, or open Terminal from Finder on the exact folder, in that case it won't work.

Changing a running command to another login is something I would like to avoid because of the strange unnecessary scheme login -> login -> zsh. You can see it in Activity Monitor, but also it will show up when you are quitting interactive programs (like, python repl) in the message that python, login and zsh are running.

Putting clear in ~/.zshrc is not ideal since on mac it just prints a lot of newlines (and if you scroll back, you'll see them).

The best way that I found up to this point is adding printf '\33c\e[3J' to ~/.zshrc (or in Terminal/Preferences/Profiles/Shell/Startup/Run command with Run inside shell checked). I chose beginning of ~/.zshrc file since startup command is running after it and if the ~/.zshrc file is heavy you can briefly see Last Login message before printf is executed.

A simple solution without changing anything related to login would be just to add the clear command in the end of your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc file. It will clear the terminal in initialization from any initialization prints. It works for me very well.