When Urchin runs a directory of files, it goes through the following steps. 1. Head 2. Test 3. Foot 4. Reporting Urchin stores files in a temporary directory, creating a new directory on each invocation. The directory contains these things. * head (file) * test (file) * foot (file) * stdout (directory) When run on remotes, the temporary directory corresponding to the local master process additionally has these files. * remote-test Messages from the head, test, and foot steps go in the corresponding files. In the head and foot phases, messages are just simple prints. Messages from the test phase always correspond to a particular test file, and they are written to the test file in a delimiter-separated format. Stdout and stderr from test runs are written to files in the stdout directory, one file per test file per shell that the file is run in. In most cases Urchin begins printing to the screen only during the reporting phase. The only case where anything is printed beforehand is when Urchin is run with -vvvv; that sets "+x", so the commands are printed as they run, though all other output is still suppressed. Test results are reported in the reporting phase. Four output formats are available. * Urchin's human-readable format (default) * Test Anything Protocol * Delimiter-separated values (used internally) * Remote Urchin worker output When Urchin runs tests on a remote, it copies tests to the remote and then calls Urchin with "--format=remote". This specifies the following. * The temporary directory should be kept, rather than deleted, after Urchin runs. * The path of the temporary directory should be printed as output. * No other output should be printed to stdout. After the remote Urchin finishes running, the local urchin downloads the remote Urchin's test log file from the temporary directory. It modifies the file to include the remote's name and then concatenates the result to the "remote-test" file in the local temporary directory. For example, the file from the remote might look like this, sh:Counting tests/.test/faila:0:not_ok and the result might look like this. sh on nsa:Counting tests/.test/faila:0:not_ok This gets processed in the reporting step like usual, according to whatever format is specified. Instead of printing just "sh" as the environment in which the particular test was run, the report will print "sh on nsa".