Skip to content

analyse srum --stats-only --output <file> produces an empty file and suppresses the console table #236

Closed

Description

@al-williams-dev

Chainsaw version: 2.16.4 (Windows)

Command run:
chainsaw.exe analyse srum --software "\SOFTWARE" "\SRUDB.dat" --stats-only --output "\stats.json"

Expected behavior:
Per analyse srum --help, --stats-only is described as "Only output details about the SRUM database" — I expected this to write the same per-extension-table stats summary (table name, DLL path, timeframe, retention) that prints to console when running the same command without --stats-only, just directed into the --output file instead of stdout.

Actual behavior:

  • The output file is created but is 0 bytes.
  • The console table itself also doesn't print — only the [+] Details about the tables related to the SRUM extensions: header line appears, with no rows following it.

This is a regression relative to the same command without --stats-only: running analyse srum --software ... --output <file> (no --stats-only) on the identical database, moments earlier in the same session, printed the full table to console correctly and wrote real content to the output file (in that case, ESE catalog data rather than the stats table — a related but separate point below). Adding --stats-only didn't just change what went to the file — it appears to have broken the table generation itself.

Repro steps:

  1. chainsaw.exe analyse srum --software "<path>\SOFTWARE" "<path>\SRUDB.dat" — console prints the stats table correctly.
  2. chainsaw.exe analyse srum --software "<path>\SOFTWARE" "<path>\SRUDB.dat" --stats-only --output "<path>\stats.json" — console shows only the header line, no table; stats.json is 0 bytes.

Additional context:
Separately, --output without --stats-only does write real content, but it appears to be a raw ESE catalog/schema dump (table names like MSysObjects, fields like ColtypOrPgnoFDP, ObjidTable) rather than SRUM-semantic data (no AppId, Bytes, or Duration fields anywhere in ~650K records) — possibly expected/by design, but worth mentioning in case it's related to how --stats-only is meant to interact with --output.

Happy to provide the SOFTWARE hive / SRUDB.dat used for this repro if useful, though they're pulled from a live personal machine so I'd want to sanitize first.

Activity

  1. alexkornitzer commented on Aug 25, 2026

    @alexkornitzer
    Collaborator

    Thanks for raising, that should now be fixed in v2.16.5.

  2. added a commit that references this issue on Aug 25, 2026
    2e787a0
Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    No labels
    No labels

    Type

    No type

    Projects

    No projects

      Milestone

      No milestone

      Relationships

      None yet

      Development

      No branches or pull requests

      Issue actions