Impossible to capture stdOut??

[AxOn]

Hi!
Has anybody encountered console exe's that are impossible to get stdOut
from? Does anybody know if there are different(other then string text)
ways that console exe files send out their outputs??

[Gabriel Magaña]

Re: Impossible to capture stdOut??

Some old apps used to write directly to the display buffer, bypassing all
stdio function calls. Also some apps write to stderr device, which by
default was/is the same as stdout.

But this is all nerdy, very old-style programming... Are you talking about
an old application (ie, DOS), or something newer?

[AxOn]

Re: Impossible to capture stdOut??

The DOS application is from the mid 90's, so it's pretty old. I have
tried to capture the stdOut using system diagnostics and process
handeling. I can capture stdOuts like the result of using ping.exe etc.
but when I try using the old DOS exe I get nothing out. I would really
appreciate if somebody could help me with this problem.

[AxOn]

Re: Impossible to capture stdOut??

Also when i try to write the stdOut from the exe to a text file in the
cmd console with >outfile.txt all i get is an empty file :(

[Gabriel Magaña]

Re: Impossible to capture stdOut??

Then I'd say the app is writing directly to the memory buffer, in which case
you are screwed :-(...

Unless windows has some new APIs for consoles to grab screenshots, you are
going to have to think up of some alternate way of getting the output.

I think writing directly to the video buffer was even a compiler option for
several compilers in the past. This was very often done for speed reasons,
writing directly to the display memory resulted in huge app speed
improvements over using the bios stdio functions.