newtask is an important tool when you start applications in a different project context, for example for resource control purposes. May be you may remember my tutorial “Less known Solaris Features: Resource Management - Part 2: How to work with Tasks and Projects”. Heck, it’s over 13 years old now. And the stuff still works.
Sometimes you would like to know the task id of the newly started programs. You can get this information by using the -v option.
root@solaris:~# newtask -v cat /etc/motd
532
narfThere is just one small problem with this option. The task id is written to stderr.
root@solaris:~# newtask -v cat /etc/sistem
541
cat: cannot open /etc/sistem: No such file or directory
root@solaris:~# newtask -v cat /etc/sistem 2> testThat makes it sometimes problematic to find out which line is the task id, because it’s not always the case, that the task id is on the first line.
A new option in newtask makes it much easier to use this command in scripts. With -o the newtask command will write the task id into a file.
root@solaris:~# newtask -o narffile cat /var/sistem
cat: cannot open /var/sistem: No such file or directory
root@solaris:~# cat narffile
545root@solaris:~#Yes it’s a small change, but a really useful one.
