Hello,
Recently a customer asked whether he could get a GUI version of one of
our console apps because the flashing console is annoying him. Fair
enough, I thought, this should be easy. We do it with our C utilities
already.
I know that a writeln() in a GUI app crashes, from when someone left a
stray writeln() in FPC 3.0.x and our app started crashing when looking
for updates online. Can someone explain to me what the use of this is?
If you know that a handle doesn't exist, why not just redirect the
output to 'nul'?
I set out to do this myself, when I discovered that fpc tries to show
anything that you write to stdout/stderr in a messagebox. It does this
even when the handles are being redirected (to e.g. pipes) by the
calling application. Relevant code in syswin.inc (procedure
SysInitStdIO):
if not IsConsole then
begin
AssignError(stderr);
AssignError(StdOut);
Assign(Output,'');
Assign(Input,'');
Assign(ErrOutput,'');
end
...
...
Showing writeln output in a messagebox is questionable, but it doesn't
even do it for Output and ErrOutput. The documentation says they are
aliases for stdout/stderr? So not only does it ignore whichever
possibly valid handles in Std{Output|Input|Error}Handle, but it also
leaves ErrOutput pointing to StdOutputHandle.
For anyone interested, this is what I had to do so that a command like
"app > stdout.txt 2> stderr.txt" behaves as expected:
{$ifdef windows}
function CanOpenHandle(AHandle: THandle): Boolean;
begin
Result := GetFileType(AHandle) in [FILE_TYPE_DISK, FILE_TYPE_PIPE,
FILE_TYPE_CHAR];
end;
procedure RedirectStdIO(var AFile: Text; AHandle: THandle);
var
CanOpen: Boolean;
begin
CanOpen := CanOpenHandle(AHandle);
AssignFile(AFile, IfThen(CanOpen, '', 'nul'));
if AHandle = StdOutputHandle then begin
Rewrite(AFile);
end else if AHandle = StdErrorHandle then begin
Rewrite(AFile);
{ Rewriting a file with a '' name will use StdOutputHandle, but we want
StdErrorHandle, so hack it in. }
if CanOpen then
TextRec(AFile).Handle := AHandle;
end else if AHandle = StdInputHandle then begin
Reset(AFile);
end;
end;
procedure RedirectWinGUIStdIO;
begin
if IsConsole then
Exit;
RedirectStdIO(StdOut, StdOutputHandle);
RedirectStdIO(Output, StdOutputHandle);
RedirectStdIO(StdErr, StdErrorHandle);
RedirectStdIO(ErrOutput, StdErrorHandle);
RedirectStdIO(Input, StdInputHandle);
end;
{$endif}
Then call RedirectWinGUIStdIO at the start. I hope it works for all
possibilities, my Windows skills are lacking.
Henry
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