Where does the output of a background job go?
We have some jobs running in background but we didn't take out the screen labels, the messages, etc.
We have noticed the existence of some .LOG files which contain seems to be the program output.
The answer is: it depends.
The screen output of A-Shell is normally the stdout channel, which is sent to wherever stdout is directed to go. For normal terminal processes, that would be the terminal. For background processes, it would default to the same place as the parent's stdout channel. (You can easily see this by executing
ls & from the linux shell prompt and seeing that the directory list appears on the screen exactly as if you had executed it in foreground.)
A-Shell background processes are typically launched either via crontab entries, or via SUBMIT.
In the crontab case, the output would go to the cron service's stdout, which is configurable but is usually something like /var/log/cron.d. Since that's not very convenient, when I launch A-Shell processes from crontab, I use a script named ashterm ...
# script to run ashell after first setting TERM var
TERM=dumb
PATH=/u1/miame/bin:$PATH
export TERM PATH
/u1/miame/bin/ashell -n -e -i /u1/miame/miame.ini $1 $2 $3 $4
exit
... and then I explicitly redirect the stdout and stderr channels to a file, e.g.
/u1/miame/bin/ashterm pmexp > /u1/miame/util/pmexp.lst
Note that I set TERM=dumb to eliminate the escape sequences that would otherwise be in the output, based on the terminal emulation.
Normally these output files are ignored (and I would design the background program to explicitly generate meaningful data output, rather than just a log of the screen output). But, the screen output log could be useful for debugging if the process doesn't run as expected.
In the
SUBMIT case, the output is by default directed to a file named xxxxxx.LOG where xxxxxxx is the name of the CTL file being submitted, although you can override it with the /L switch.
So my guess is that's where your LOG files are coming from.
