uccxmgm@unx2.ucc.okstate.edu (Martin McCormick) (04/05/91)
The art of running a program in DOS so that its output can be
captured is a bit tricky. in theory, you type the name of
the program whose output you wish to capture followed by a
space, then the > sign and the name of the data file which
will hold the output. You won't see any of the output during
this time, but you can see it when you read the file in the
editor. You should be able to get some programs to work just
fine, but many won't work because they do not use standard
output. They write their output directly to whichever screen
buffer is in use. You will see your screen displaying the
output from the program, but nothing will be captured. The
Unix-like idea of standard input and output was one of the
greatest things that the MS-DOS operating system had to
offer. It is too bad that the standard output device was so
slow that software developers began to discard it in favor of
reinventing the wheel each time they wrote a program.
Another neat trick is to get one of those public domain
device drivers which can rerout the parallel printer feed to
a disk file and then hit your ctrl-prtsc key. This will put
a log of everything that happened on the screen into the
file. If the program whose output you wish to capture does
not use standard output, this method won't work either, but
when it does, you can run your program and interact with it
just like normal.
Martin McCormick
WB5AGZ
Oklahoma State University
Computer Center
Data Communications Group
Stillwater, OK