See also issue569 when working on this.

I took care of the comments and merged.

I left some comments on bitbucket.

I updated the pull request. It is ready for review again.

As discussed offline, we should make sure this behaves as we would like it to
when no component selection options are specified are on the command line, but
the input file given is a SAS file. In this case we only run search, and we
shouldn't delete the input file.

Jendrik, please let me know once this is ready for review again. (Perhaps this
case is already handled correctly and it is already ready.)

I updated the patch accordingly.

In a live discussion, I suggested some changes to the documentation and to the
details of the defaults.

I made a pull request for this at https://bitbucket.org/jendrikseipp/downward/pull-requests/110 .

> To be clear, currently lab does not read output.sas for any of the property parsing?

No, it doesn't.

Added cross-reference to issue569.

Sounds good to me. If the default behaviour is for the driver to delete the
file, then I think there should be an option to keep the file around.

> However, I think this functionality belongs into the driver, since external
> tools like Lab should not have to know about internals like the translator
> output filename.

I'm not 100% convinced by that argument. I think it's normal that a program (in
this case Fast Downward) produces output files, and I think it's normal that an
experiment framework might need to have a look into these output files (and
decide whether or not to keep them around). This applies both to output.sas and
the plan files that the planner produces.

But independently of this line of reasoning, I agree that it makes sense to be
able to control in the driver whether or not the output.sas file is kept.

To be clear, currently lab does not read output.sas for any of the property parsing?

Currently, Lab deletes the "output.sas" file after running the driver. However, I 
think this functionality belongs into the driver, since external tools like Lab 
should not have to know about internals like the translator output filename.

I propose to let the driver delete "output.sas" when the search component finishes. 
If only the translator is run or when the soon-to-be-merged --translator-output-file 
option is used, the output file should not be deleted.

This is related to the idea of pipelining the translator output to the search (see 
issue569), where we also wouldn't have an intermediate file after the driver exits.