Disabling console output, especially the progress bar

As far as the Modest people in Saarbrücken know, there is no way to disable the console output, especially the progress bar. For some purposes, like e.g. for debugging, but also for other applications where no statistics etc. are used, it would be great to have a flag or a parameter to enable/disable the output. More concrete this is sometimes necessary, because the progress bar can be interleaved by other outputs, which then are partially overwritten. In addition the progress bar causes crashes of the execution if the console window is resized/moved to another window during execution on linux.