Xauthority file does not exist - so what?

I run X11 programs on a Linux host, displaying remotely on a Mac running the XQuartz X11 server. First of all, this is all on my private LAN so I don't need to tunnel the X connection through SSH, and I don't want to for reasons of performance. To transfer access rights to the display I use a command (on the Mac) akin to

xauth nlist machost:0 | ssh linuxhost xauth nmerge -

This works almost perfectly - _except_ that the useless message in the title gets printed if the authority file doesn't exist already. Here, then, is my question: how can I suppress this useless message, while still getting alerted about real errors? The -q flag to xauth doesn't help, I tried that already.