Tom Dunham's questions

So I'm trying to find out if the stderr of a process has been redirected to somewhare unusual (it's a java process and I want a thread dump, but it's launched through a nest of startup scripts).

I find my process with pgrep, and use pfiles to see what's there:

4366:   /foo/bar/platform/solaris2/jre_1.5.0/bin/java -Xmx2048m -Xms10
Current rlimit: 65536 file descriptors
 0: S_IFCHR mode:0666 dev:302,0 ino:6815752 uid:0 gid:3 rdev:13,2
    O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE
    /devices/pseudo/mm@0:null
 1: S_IFREG mode:0640 dev:85,56 ino:26471 uid:0 gid:0 size:10485812
    O_WRONLY|O_LARGEFILE
 2: S_IFREG mode:0640 dev:85,56 ino:26471 uid:0 gid:0 size:10485812
    O_WRONLY|O_LARGEFILE
 3: S_IFCHR mode:0666 dev:302,0 ino:6815772 uid:0 gid:3 rdev:13,12

So I can see that stdout and stderr (file descriptors 1 and 2) are pointing to the same place; I think they are redirected to the same file in the startup scripts so this tallies.

But when I look for a file with inode number 26471, I see this:

# find / -inum 26471
/usr/share/man/man3mlib/mlib_MatrixScale_S16_U8_Sat.3mlib
/proc/4366/fd/1
/proc/4366/fd/2
/proc/4366/fd/83

The first hit is (I'm certain) a file on a different filesystem. The three entries in /proc are fds my process has open.

Looking in /proc/4366, I can't see any more info than I get from pfiles.

# ls -li 0 1 2 3
   6815752 c---------   1 root     sys       13,  2 Jan 20 14:10 0
     26471 --w-------   0 root     root     10485812 Jan 20 13:42 1
     26471 --w-------   0 root     root     10485812 Jan 20 13:42 2
   6815772 c---------   1 root     sys       13, 12 Jun  7  2009 3
# file 0 1 2 3
0:              character special (13/2)
1:              ascii text
2:              ascii text
3:              character special (13/12)

(I can tail one of these fds and work out which file it is from that. I'm asking because I clearly don't understand the relationship between the fds and the inodes in enough depth).

So my process is writing to something (on some device, with inode 26471) and the data is then getting into a file with a different inode number. Can anyone give me an idea of what this something might be (or even let me know if my reasoning so far is totally broken)?

I have a scheduled task that starts a batch script that runs robocopy every hour. Every time it runs a window pops up on the desktop with robocopy's output, which I don't really want to see.

I managed to make the window appear minimized by making the scheduled job run

cmd /c start /min mybat.bat

but that gives me a new command window every hour. I was surprised by this, given cmd /c "Carries out the command specified by string and then terminates" - I must have misunderstood the docs.

Is there a way to run a batch script without it popping up a cmd window?