Bugs We Found

We needed a place to put the geeky things we've bumped into, and this is as good a spot as any. Below you'll be bored to tears about things we've literally cried over before we figured out it wasn't our fault. If it helps save you from some pain, our tears were worth it.

Robocopy MIRROR message

Window's ROBOCOPY utility is a great little backup tool. However, if you're using it in a DOS batch script, and would like to keep the output quiet or silent, it has a bug. If you use the /MIRROR switch (or it's equivilient /E /PURGE), and redirect the STDOUT and STDERR to NUL using >NUL 2>&1 , you will still see the message "Going to mirror ..." appear in the DOS window when you run the script. It looks like there is probably a programming debug message that forces output to the screen to help programmers track logical progress, but that output is not trappable. I even tried piping the output to a FIND command that intentionally found nothing, and the message still appears.

If you think you've found a solution to any of these issues, we'd love to know about it. Contact us and let us know, and we'll post your solution if it works for us as well.