[texhax] Suppress log files?

[Tom Schneider]

Jonathan:

> As you may know, I'm interested in running TeX as
> a daemon, and so am interested in the input/output
> behaviour of TeX, and in these sort of tricks.

One trick I now use (in Unix systems) is to call a script that
generates dates like this:

2007Jan11.08:53:24

which I call a 'tomdate' for some odd reason ;-)

ftp://ftp.ncifcrf.gov/pub/delila/tomdate

Then I attach to that the name of the user with `whoami`.  Usually a
particular user does not run a script more often than one per second. 
So this combination, along with the name of the script, can be used as
the name of a directory in /tmp, which exists on all Unix systems
(Mac, Linux, Sun, probably cygwin etc).  That gives one a file or
directory to work in that will be removed when the machine is
rebooted.  Then cleaning up files is somewhat optional and can be done
once the script is completely debugged.

For example:

set t1 = /tmp/`whoami`.`tomdate`.1.petals
set t2 = /tmp/`whoami`.`tomdate`.2.petals
set t3 = /tmp/`whoami`.`tomdate`.3.petals

Then the script can use any of the three names $t1, $t2 or $t3 for
storage.

Tom

  Dr. Thomas D. Schneider
  National Institutes of Health
  National Cancer Institute
  Center for Cancer Research Nanobiology Program
  Molecular Information Theory Group
  Frederick, Maryland  21702-1201
  toms at ncifcrf.gov
  permanent email: toms at alum.mit.edu (use only if first address fails)
  http://www.ccrnp.ncifcrf.gov/~toms/