Printing windowed application output in bat file

[Josh]

When Leadwerks Editor runs a game compiled as a Windowed application (no console) it successfully prints the game's output, even though there is no console.

 

When a bat file is used to do the same thing, no text is printed. Is there a way to do this?

[Crazycarpet]

You mean forward console output to a file? Run the program with the command line parameter: "> "output.txt"" or whatever file you want it to forward stdout to.

 

Example bat file:

start "Hale3DEditor" "Hale3DEditor-Debug.exe" "> console.txt"

[Josh]

No, I mean actually print / echo the output of a winnowed application. The console of a bat file only shows the output of a console application. It does not show the output of a windowed application, even though Leadwerks editor shows it, and it can be printed to a text file with a bat file. So what is the default > setting to make a bat file actually show the text the program it runs?

[Crazycarpet]

Oh, I don't know... I feel like if the output isn't already being redirected it should print to the console by default. I don't know how you'd do this if it's not already doing it, sorry.

 

Edit:

-Keep in mind if the application doesn't open it's own console it has no object to pass stdout to... it'd be NULL, so unless you could set from C++ the console to redirect stdout to (the one created by the batch file) this might not be do-able.

If you wanted to build it right into the engine you could create a console and redirect stdout and what not, stderr, etc... but other then that idk.

[IgorBgz90]

Hi Josh,

A couple of years ago I made my dedicated server (app) for minecraft=), there for interception from the console I used pipes. But, this is works only in windows.

#include <windows.h>
#include <iostream>
#include <string>
#include <stdio.h>

#pragma warning(disable : 4996) // For GetVersionEx

#define bzero(a) memset(a,0,sizeof(a))

char buf[1024];
STARTUPINFO si;
SECURITY_ATTRIBUTES sa;
SECURITY_DESCRIPTOR sd;
PROCESS_INFORMATION pi;
HANDLE newstdin, newstdout, read_stdout, write_stdin;
unsigned long bread;
unsigned long avail;

bool IsWinNT()
{
OSVERSIONINFO osv;
osv.dwOSVersionInfoSize = sizeof(osv);
GetVersionEx(&osv);
return (osv.dwPlatformId == VER_PLATFORM_WIN32_NT);
}
std::wstring s2ws(const std::string& s)
{
int len;
int slength = (int)s.length() + 1;
len = MultiByteToWideChar(CP_ACP, 0, s.c_str(), slength, 0, 0);
wchar_t* buf = new wchar_t[len];
MultiByteToWideChar(CP_ACP, 0, s.c_str(), slength, buf, len);
std::wstring r(buf);
delete[] buf;
return r;
}
bool CreateAnonymousPipes(std::string procName)
{
if (IsWinNT())
{
InitializeSecurityDescriptor(&sd, SECURITY_DESCRIPTOR_REVISION);
SetSecurityDescriptorDacl(&sd, true, NULL, false);
sa.lpSecurityDescriptor = &sd;
}
else {
sa.lpSecurityDescriptor = NULL;
}
sa.nLength = sizeof(SECURITY_ATTRIBUTES);
sa.bInheritHandle = true;
//CreatePipe(&newstdin, &write_stdin, &sa, 0); //stdin
CreatePipe(&read_stdout, &newstdout, &sa, 0); //stdout
GetStartupInfo(&si);
si.dwFlags = STARTF_USESTDHANDLES | STARTF_USESHOWWINDOW;
si.wShowWindow = SW_HIDE;
si.hStdOutput = newstdout;
si.hStdError = newstdout;
//si.hStdInput = newstdin;
std::wstring stemp = std::wstring(procName.begin(), procName.end());
if (CreateProcess(stemp.c_str(), NULL, NULL, NULL, TRUE, CREATE_NEW_CONSOLE, NULL, NULL, &si, π)) {
return true;
}
bzero(buf);
return false;
}
// Child process stdout
void ReceiveChild()
{
PeekNamedPipe(read_stdout, buf, 1023, &bread, &avail, NULL);
if (bread != 0)
{
bzero(buf);
if (avail > 1023)
{
while (bread >= 1023)
{
ReadFile(read_stdout, buf, 1023, &bread, NULL);
bzero(buf);
}
}
else {
ReadFile(read_stdout, buf, 1023, &bread, NULL);
if (buf != "") {
std::cout << buf << std::endl; // STDOUT
}
}
}
}
int main(int argc, char** argv)
{
std::string filename;
if (argc > 1) {
std::cout << argv[1] << std::endl;
filename = argv[1];
}

bool start = CreateAnonymousPipes(filename); // Windowed app start
while (start) {
Sleep(1);
ReceiveChild();
}
return 0;
}

[Josh]

This is not critical but I wanted to make sure there was no way to do this before I write up my blog. Thanks for the info.

[Einlander]

Would this help? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/191842/how-do-i-get-console-output-in-c-with-a-windows-program

And further reading: https://www.gamedev.net/topic/509479-routing-stdout-to-windowconsole/?whichpage=1#3320937

 

Sadly I am not a c++ guy so I cant be much help here.