How to suppress a proc's return value in tcl prompt - tcl

Question

I'm relatively new in TCL, in TCL prompt, when we invoke a proc with some return value, the proc's return value is echoed back by tcl. Is there a way to stop it (without affecting puts or similar functionality) as an example
bash$ tclsh
% proc a {} { puts "hello"; return 34; }
% a
hello
34
%
Now how do i suppress the 34 coming to the screen? Any help is appreciated.
Update:
Actually the proc is a part of another tool, earlier it did not have any return value, but now conditionally it can return a value.
it can be called from a script and there won't be any problem (as Bryan pointed out). and it can be called from interactive prompt, then after all the necessary outputs, the return value is getting printed unnecessarily.
So 1) I don't have the facility of changing a user's tclshrc 2) existing scripts should continue to work.
And it seems strange that every time the proc is called, after all the necessary outputs, a number gets printed. To a user, this is a needless information unless he has caught the value and wants to do something. So i wanted the value to be delivered to user, but without getting printed to prompt/UI (hope i'm clear )

Answer 1

The interactive shell code in tclsh and wish will print any non-empty result. To get nothing printed, you have to have the last command on the “line” produce an empty result. But which command to use?
Many commands will produce an empty result:
if 1 {}
subst ""
format ""
However, the shortest is probably:
list
Thus, you could write your code like:
a;list
Of course, this only really becomes useful when your command actually produces a large result that you don't want to see. In those cases, I often find that it is most useful to use something that measures the size of the result, such as:
set tmp [something_which_produces a_gigantic result]; string length $tmp
The most useful commands I find for that are string length, llength and dict size.
If you absolutely must not print the result of the command, you have to write your own interactive loop. There are two ways to do this, depending on whether you are running inside the event loop or not:
Without the event loop
This simplistic version just checks to see if the command name is in what the user typed. It's probably not a good idea to arbitrarily throw away results otherwise!
set accum ""
while {[gets stdin line] >= 0} {
append accum $line "\n"
if {[info complete $accum]} {
if {[catch $accum msg]} {
puts stderr $msg
} elseif {$msg ne "" && ![string match *TheSpecialCommand* $accum]} {
puts $msg
}
set accum ""
}
}
With the event loop
This is just handling the blocking IO case; that's the correct thing when input is from a cooked terminal (i.e., the default)
fileevent stdin readable handleInput
set accum ""
proc handleInput {} {
global accum
if {[gets stdin line] < 0} {
exit; # Or whatever
}
append accum $line "\n"
if {[info complete $accum]} {
if {[catch {uplevel "#0" $accum} msg]} {
puts stderr $msg
} elseif {$msg ne "" && ![string match *TheSpecialCommand* $accum]} {
puts $msg
}
set accum ""
}
}
vwait forever; # Assuming you're not in wish or have some other event loop...
How to detect the command is being executed
The code above uses ![string match *TheSpecialCommand* $accum] to decide whether to throw away the command results, but this is very ugly. A more elegant approach that leverages Tcl's own built-in hooks is to use an execution trace to detect whether the command has been called (I'll just show the non-event-loop version here, for brevity). The other advantage of this is that it is simple to extend to suppressing the output from multiple commands: just add the trace to each of them.
trace add execution TheSpecialCommand enter SuppressOutput
proc SuppressOutput args {
# Important; do not suppress when it is called inside another command
if {[info level] == 1} {
set ::SuppressTheOutput 1
}
}
# Mostly very similar from here on
set accum ""
while {[gets stdin line] >= 0} {
append accum $line "\n"
if {[info complete $accum]} {
set SuppressTheOutput 0; # <<<<<< Note this!
if {[catch $accum msg]} {
puts stderr $msg
} elseif {$msg ne "" && !$SuppressTheOutput} { # <<<<<< Note this!
puts $msg
}
set accum ""
}
}
To be clear, I wouldn't ever do this in my own code! I'd just suppress the output manually if it mattered.

Answer 2

You could make an empty procedure in .tclshrc...
proc void {} {}
...and when you don't need a return value, end the line with ;void.

Answer 3

Use tcl_interactive variable to enable the return of of the value, although I'm not sure where this would be useful...
proc a {} {
puts "hello"
if { [info exist tcl_interactive] } {
return {};
} else {
return 34;
}
}