Renaming trace logs

[szymczak]

We recently upgraded to VA 7.5 from IBM VAST 4.0. We removed a splash screen exe from the command line and began using the VA bitmap file feature. Later I discovered that underappreciated splash screen exe was also providing functionality that created unique tracelog names for each user's session. This splash screen exe was written years ago in CC++ and built using Visual Studio 6.0. We no longer have the original environment or anyone who uses this technology. The original developer is long gone. I was thinking I'd have to at least rebuild the spash screen exe with the new Smalltalk VM dll and there may be other changes too. Does anyone know a more modern way to rename tracelog files?

[szymczak]

I see there have been a few views of my post, but no replies. Maybe I didn't explain it well. I want to know if others are renaming the trace.log file such that they have a unique log for each user session, and if so how are they doing this? Thanks.

[koschate]

Speaking for myself, I'm not exactly sure what you refer to when you mention trace logs. I assume you're using packaged images and writing to a log file. Possibly you're capturing Transcript output to a file. You might find what you're looking for with CfsStat class>>#abtUniqueName:, which will take a file name skeleton and answer a unique name based on that.

[szymczak]

Yes, I am referring to the log file that is specified by the -l command line parameter when starting our packaged image. (I thought I saw a reference to trace log somewhere and assumed this was a standard name). We use Citrix to host our application and use the command line argument -ltrace.log. A c++ exe runs and renames the tracelog that was created so that each user has a unique file for their session. I was hoping I wouldn't have to delve into this old c++ build and wondered if others had the need to create unique log files and how they managed to do that. Thanks for your response.

[marten]

What about changing the command line (under Windows) to:

-l%USERNAME%.log

?

[szymczak]

Currently the logs are going to individual user directories based on the userid. Having a separate log file for each session, organized by date/time is very useful if we ever need to go back and debug. The c++ program grabs the trace.log from the command line and renames it to something like trace080807033825.log. Thanks much for your reply.

[koschate]

By the sounds of it, your best bet would be to provide the appropriate file name to begin with, by invoking the VA program from a shell script of some sort. Basic Windows CMD files won't give you the flexibility you need, but you might want to check out Microsoft's Powershell, which is a free download.