Question

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DOS command to Display result on console and redirect the output to a file

tried various Google searches but nothing seemed to solve my problem.

Basically I’m working for a company who need me to work with their in place database and extract the various data need for reports. They are using Sqlite (please, I’ve heard enough comments about how it might not be the best choice for a DB, so leave them out) and I either want all my activity on Windows command prompt to be logged, or at least everything I do from the Sqlite command line to appear in a .txt, just in case I need to refer back to it later.

Can anybody here explain to me how to do this? I’m a bit of a beginner and need this stuff broken down step by step. Not done anything like this before.

Cheers!

Answer 1

I’m reasonably certain you can’t do this directly — i.e., the Windows command prompt doesn’t provide a way to log the input you provide to it. You can capture outputs (e.g., from commands you run), but for your purposes that’s probably not adequate.

You probably need to create a “shell” of your own that takes inputs from the user, logs each one, sends it on to the command prompt, captures the output from the command prompt, and logs that as well.

In an answer to a previous question, I posted some code that handles most of what you need to do. The big difference is that you’ll want to look in its handle_output (for example) and instead of just displaying the captured output to the console, write it to a file as well. As it stands right now, that example redirects the child’s standard input to come from a file, but changing it to read from the console instead should be fairly straightforward — you’ll basically use a function about like the handle_output and handle_error that it already includes, but instead of displaying output, you’ll read input from the user, and each line you’ll 1) write to the log, and 2) send to the child via anonymous pipe (much like handle_output and handle_error read from anonymous pipes).