How would the program know it is being started as a 'runlevel script'? The filehandles STDOUT and STDERR are always defined. They may or may not be writing to anything readable by default. For example, if you run myscript.pl <args> > /dev/null 2>&1 (from a *nix environment), then STDOUT and STDERR are both writing to nothing. Your script should be fine re-opening them in the fashion you are demonstrating

Given that, since this is a script being run as part of system startup, you do need to make sure that it is run after all scripts that initialize OS services/features that the script relies on.

fnord