[GRASS-dev] Merging stdout and stderr

[Paul Kelly]

The GRASS console thing (I guess that's where the name gronsole comes 
from?) which runs commands via the Tcl/Tk "open" command and captures 
their stdout and stderr, displaying some output as-is to the gronsole 
window and catching certain things like percentage complete and warnings 
and displaying them differently is actually quite cool.

I remember discussion on the list about how stdout and stderr had to be 
merged because Tcl/Tk has a bug/feature in that it treats anything written 
to stderr as an error indicator for the called program. On Unix this 
merging is done as follows:
set cmd [concat | $cmd 2>@ stdout]
but the "2>@ stdout" syntax will not work on Windows. A cross-platform 
solution would be to use the "|&" redirector instead of "2>@". "|&" means 
"pipe both stdout and stderr to stdin of the following command" (see 
http://www.tcl.tk/man/tcl8.5/tutorial/Tcl26.html ). This command could 
then copy everything to its stdout and that's what gronsole gets back.

The Unix cat command is an obvious choice but it isn't available on 
Windows. "more" kind of works but it's a shell (cmd.exe) built-in command 
on Windows so not suitable either. I was wondering if anybody has any 
thoughts on
1. Are there any other Windows commands that might be suitable for this?
or
2. Might it be a worthwhile idea to include a simple program with GRASS 
that did this (copies everything from stdin to stdout) so we can be sure 
what's going on?

I know I could get this working some hackish way but would like to do it 
as elegantly as possible - so it would be great if we can come up with 
something.

Paul