In the case of A-Shell/UNIX without the /after or /next switches, A-Shell launches a new process to run the specified task as a child of the current process. However, unlike the Windows case, the new process does run in background, with all of its screen output being written to the LOG file (e.g. a file with the same name and location as the ctlfile, but with a LOG extension.) If the parent exits before the child does, the child task will continue to run but will be marked as a zombie.

In the above case, if there is an error during the attempt to launch the new instance of A-Shell (perhaps because the ashell executable is not in the PATH or the MIAME environment variable is not defined), then information about the error will be written to the standard A-Shell log file (ashlog.log, in the directory where miame.ini is located).