>> Maybe I should have explained better: the scanner only scans to this
>> CIFS share. I can't do ps or tee as my computer has no control over the
>> scanner: all I see is a filesystem on another machine, or - if I'm in
>> process of scanning - no filesystem.

Hi Stewart, you could just watch the file listing (adjusting n seconds to whatever is suitable)

watch --differences -n 10 ls -l </path/to/shared/dir>

I have no idea what may or may not happen when your actually scanning since you say the file system is no longer visible, but give this a shot and see. Good luck.

Aruna