Re: [PATCH 3/3] Teach cat-file a --quiet option

"Shawn O. Pearce" [off-list ref] writes:

Sometimes when you get the content of a file in a script you don't
want an error message for missing files; instead its OK to treat
a missing file the same as one whose content was empty.

This is especially true if the script is using something like
`cat-file blob HEAD:path/to/file` to look at an optional file's
content.

I am not sure if I agree with this logic.  How is this different
from discarding stderr to /dev/null?