Gene Heskett wrote:

Ahh, I see, there are two 'planner's on the system, one is a gtk tool of some sort, and one that is part of amanda is in /usr/local/libexec. Running this as root gives a way too verbose output, can I strip it down to just the final results?

No

What I need is the line "getting estimates took" and everything after it in the log. The nitty-gritty traffic can go to /dev/null AFAIC. Or is that possible. I could write a script to edit it I suppose... Or even grep -A200 'getting estimates took' would get me what I want to know.

Maybe you only need stdout, you can try to put stderr to /dev/null.