doh...indeed it would. -V does not work here...must be an alsa/arecord version difference...hmm.arecord -vvv mono /dev/null 2>/dev/null
But both of these constructs create a file called "mono"!
And the /dev/null...which grows when recording and then becomes a 0 byte 'normal' file...picked up because nfsd would not start at boot. Again I suspect version differences. hw worked for me but you needed plughw (which works for me too).
Ok well ignore that one for now...I will test further armed with new knowledge.
And yes clumsy way of killing but i'm testing in bash/gtkdialog so did not see a way of getting the pid from the button launcher...I'm sure you'll neaten that up. I also felt the urge to kill alsamixer as well once recording starts as it should be superfluous by then and tidies up the window presence.
I just keep lobbing things in there...just pick out anything useful
by the way that was a quick sleep
regards
mike