CODEWITHSUNDEEP
autoit
dandino
dandino

Reputation: 11

AutoIt Scripting for an External CLI Program - eac3to.exe

I am attempting to design a front end GUI for a CLI program by the name of eac3to.exe. The problem as I see it is that this program sends all of it's output to a cmd window. This is giving me no end of trouble because I need to get a lot of this output into a GUI window. This sounds easy enough, but I am begining to wonder whether I have found one of AutoIt's limitations?

I can use the Run() function with a windows internal command such as Dir and then get the output into a variable with the AutoIt StdoutRead() function, but I just can't get the output from an external program such as eac3to.exe - it just doesn't seem to work whatever I do! Just for testing purposesI I don't even need to get the output to a a GUI window: just printing it with ConsoleWrite() is good enough as this proves that I was able to read it into a variable. So at this stage that's all I need to do - get the text (usually about 10 lines) that has been output to a cmd window by my external CLI program into a variable. Once I can do this the rest will be a lot easier. This is what I have been trying, but it never works:

Global $iPID = Run("C:\VIDEO_EDITING\eac3to\eac3to.exe","", @SW_SHOW)
Global $ScreenOutput = StdoutRead($iPID)
ConsoleWrite($ScreenOutput & @CRLF)

After running this script all I get from the consolWrite() is a blank line - not the text data that was output as a result of running eac3to.exe (running eac3to without any arguments just lists a screen of help text relating to all the commandline options), and that's what I am trying to get into a variable so that I can put it to use later in the program.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 797

Answers (1)

Milos
Milos

Reputation: 2946

Before I suggest a solution let me just tell you that Autoit has one of the best help files out there. Use it.

You are missing $STDOUT_CHILD = Provide a handle to the child's STDOUT stream. Also, you can't just do RUN and immediately call stdoutRead. At what point did you give the app some time to do anything and actually print something back to the console?

You need to either use ProcessWaitClose and read the stream then or, you should read the stream in a loop. Simplest check would be to set a sleep between RUN and READ and see what happens.

#include <AutoItConstants.au3>

Global $iPID = Run("C:\VIDEO_EDITING\eac3to\eac3to.exe","", @SW_SHOW, $STDOUT_CHILD)


; Wait until the process has closed using the PID returned by Run.
ProcessWaitClose($iPID)

; Read the Stdout stream of the PID returned by Run. This can also be done in a while loop. Look at the example for StderrRead.
; If the proccess doesnt end when finished you need to put this inside of a loop.
Local $ScreenOutput = StdoutRead($iPID)


ConsoleWrite($ScreenOutput & @CRLF)

Upvotes: 1

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