Stop ssh login from printing motd from the client?

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I’m not sure why you have an aversion to doing this correctly – either on the server a la

PrintMotd no
PrintLastLog no

and

#/etc/pam.d/ssh
# Print the message of the day upon successful login.
# session    optional     pam_motd.so

Or adding ~/.hushlogin for each user.

Hint, for ~/.hushlogin, add it to /etc/skel so new user home directories are created with the file.

Update:

Without more information about your backup cron job, my only other suggestion is to redirect the output of the command to a file (or let cron capture it in email) and the output of the ssh session to /dev/null. Something like:

0 0 * * * ssh backuphost "backup_script_that_writes_to_a_log" >/dev/null

Or

0 0 * * * ssh backuphost "backup_command 2>&1" >/dev/null

I’d have to play around with the commands a bit, but that should get you started.

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