Question

If I have an executable out.exe and it’s stdout is redirected to a file,
i.e.:

out.exe > $file

Right now if I do this it only outputs:

<-----------------------------> 
80 columns per line to the file

Is there a way to make the standard output to be wider in console column count?
Is it the out.exe that’s somehow messing with the columns?
In my case I’m using fxcopcmd.exe.

Answer 1

I encountered a similar problem a while back. Here’s what I did to fix it:

# Update output buffer size to prevent clipping in Visual Studio output window.
if( $Host -and $Host.UI -and $Host.UI.RawUI ) {
  $rawUI = $Host.UI.RawUI
  $oldSize = $rawUI.BufferSize
  $typeName = $oldSize.GetType( ).FullName
  $newSize = New-Object $typeName (500, $oldSize.Height)
  $rawUI.BufferSize = $newSize
}

It simply sets a new width of 500 characters on the host’s RawUI output buffer (though, since we run our build in several environments, and we did not want the script to fail just because it could not make the output a bit larger, the code is rather defensive).

If you run in an environment that always sets RawUI (and most do), the code can be greatly simplified:

$Host.UI.RawUI.BufferSize = New-Object Management.Automation.Host.Size (500, 25)