Question

Hi,

Back in university, when we had to submit an assignment in CS, we would have to perform a series of steps including running script, date, whoami, etc., and then running our program.

The script command would pipe all text sent to the display to both the display and a specified file as well.

Ever since, I have been looking for a Dos and/or Windows version, but have come up empty. Some programs can be redirected to a file, but then the display is not echoed, and some programs don’t seem to work with redirection at all.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

Edit So far, the answers that I’ve gotten seem to work exactly like the standard redirection commands (<, >, |). These do not work with all programs. For example, the Microsoft C++ compiler CL.EXE. If you run cl /? through a redirection command or pipe it through another program (such as TEE), you will not get the header/banner text.

Another example is a program I wrote a while back in Pascal (I think the last compile was in FreePascal). The help text does not get redirected at all. I have seen this occur with other programs as well like MKISOFS. It has a long help text, but cannot be paused by piping it through MORE or redirected to a file!

I have wondered about this for many years. I used to think that it may be because the text is being written directly to the screen (eg port B800) or something, but I have yet to pin down the cause, let alone find a program that can do this job.

Answer 1

This General Pascal FAQ explains the cause, as well as a solution for Turbo Pascal programs.

Q. When I redirect the screen output of my programs to a file the file is empty and the output still appears on the screen. What am I doing wrong?

A. You are probably using the CRT unit and its default method of writing to stdout is by direct screen writes. In order to enable output to be redirected all writes must be done by DOS. Setting the variable DirectVideo to false has no effect on redirection as all it does is use the BIOS for screen writes - not DOS.

To enable redirection you must not use the CRT unit

OR

assign(output,'');
rewrite(output);

This will make all output go through DOS and thus can be redirected if desired. To restore the default situation:

AssignCRT(output);
rewrite(output);

Answer 2

Take a look at Cygwin, it gives you access to all those great UNIX command line tools in Windows.

Answer 3

Unfortunately, it seems that you won't have luck finding an out-of-the-box Microsoft solution. You can check out a similar post on StackOverflow. The digest:

• look at the Win32 port of tee on SourceForge
• use Cygwin, as Frank Szczerba also mentions
• look at Rob van der Woude's tee implementation in a DOS Batch script
• a couple more opinions

Answer 4

I found a Cygwin port of the Unix script command. It captures both STDOUT and STDERR (so it gets the header output from cl.exe).

However capturing cmd.exe commands is a little convoluted for two reasons:

• script spawns a cygwin bash shell (not cmd.exe)
• script does not work when started from a cmd.exe shell; it must be started from cygwin.

You can do it, though:

1. open a cygwin shell.
2. start script
3. start a cmd.exe shell from within the cygwin shell
4. do your stuff in cmd.exe
5. exit out of cmd.exe
6. exit out of script

*also the cmd.exe shell spawned from inside cygwin acts a little strange, but the commands seem to work:

• the window that usually pops up if you try to run cl.exe without first running vcvars32.bat does not come up
• console input is very finicky (for example typing LEFT RIGHT cl or UP cl does not work.)