CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c++visual-studiorecursion
user4778505
user4778505

Reputation:

Show or capture complete program output using cmd.exe

I'm practising writing recursive functions using Visual Studio 2015 on Windows 7.

I use cout to track the progress of my code, but it shows too many results and even though I stop the program I can not see the initial result... I can only see the output from the middle.

How can I see the complete program output?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 397

Answers (3)

Andrew
Andrew

Reputation: 5352

The problem is that cmd.exe (the Windows commad prompt) has a fixed-size buffer for displaying output. If your program writes a lot of output, only the last N lines will be displayed, where N is the buffer size.

You can avoid this problem in several ways:

  1. Write to a file, instead of to std::cout. All of your output will be captured in the file, which you can read in the text editor of your choice.

  2. Redirect the standard output to a file. Run your program as my_prog.exe > output.log and the output will be redirected to output.log.

  3. Pipe your output to the more command, to show it one screen at a time: my_prog.exe | more

  4. Increase the cmd.exe buffer size. If you right-click on the title bar of the command window, you can select the Properties menu option. Within the Layout tab, you'll see a section called Screen buffer size. Change the Height to a larger value, and you'll be able to capture that many lines of output. Note that this is somewhat unreliable, since you often don't know in advance of executing your program how many lines it will output. One of the other approaches, using files, is often a better solution.

Note that this isn't really a problem with your C++ program. It's entirely reasonable to be able to produce a large quantity of output on the standard output stream. The best solutions are the ones that redirect or pipe the output to a file. These operations are available on most sensible platforms (and Windows, too) and do exactly what you need without having to change your program to write to a file.

Upvotes: 1

Andreas
Andreas

Reputation: 5599

Run your application from the commandline and redirect the output to a file:

yourapp.exe > yourapp.log

Upvotes: 0

Sébastien Chapuis
Sébastien Chapuis

Reputation: 185

I'm not sure to understand your problem, maybe you should write the output in a file instead of the standard output ? Then you will see all your results

Upvotes: 0

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