From: Joel VanderWerf <vjoel@...>
Date: 2004-02-03T06:00:40+09:00
Subject: Re: Questions about stdout/stderr combining (for Windows & Linux)

Patrick Bennett wrote:
> I'm working on a build tool, and I need to execute various 
> compilers/linkers and capture their output (both stdout and stderr) for 
> Windows and Linux compilations (msvc & gcc).
> The problem is I want the output to stderr and stdout to go to the same 
> pipe (same result as if you were running the program from the 
> command-line).  I can use a hack like:
>        out = `cmd /c \"#{cmdLine}\" >bs.out 2>&1`
> on windows and then simply read bs.out (which will contain both stdout 
> and stderr), but I'd prefer to avoid the overhead (and platform specific 
> code) of spawning cmd.exe to run another program.
> I'd prefer to use something like popen, but in a way that lets me get a 
> single pipe I can read from that the process's stdout & stderr pipes are 
> connected to.
> Due to different compiler's general messages and warnings/errors being 
> logged interchangably to stdout or stderr, it's not really feasible to 
> have the pipes be separate.

What about separate pipes, two threads reading them and putting messages 
in a queue, and a third thread pulling messages in from the queue?