The Old New Thing

Redirecting output can result in altered program behavior

May 19, 2006 May 19, 2006 05/19/06

Raymond Chen

Consider a program whose output to the console goes like this. (I've prefixed each line with the output stream.) You want to capture both the normal and error streams, so you run the program and append "" to capture both streams into a single file. But when you look at the resulting output file, you get this: What happened? Most ...