Windows: Determining which output stream # (1-9) console output is coming from?

Question

I've seen questions in the past about "highlighting" different output streams between STDOUT and STDERR, but I was wondering if there was maybe a simpler way to do this on Windows.

The reason I became interested was because I've had more than one application print output on streams 3 & 4, which led to confusing results & unnecessary debugging until I randomly checked every possible output stream.

Does anyone have a good built-in solution for determining which output stream console output is coming from? I imagine there should be some sort of monitor (SysInternals? WMI?) that would show where information being printed on the console is coming from?

Answer 1

Does anyone have a good built-in solution for determining which output stream console output is coming from?

You can just use Redirection syntax accordingly to see STDOUT versus STDERR to separate files. In the below example, fileA would contain STDOUT where fileB would contian STDERR.

Example: command >> fileA 2>> fileB Redirect output and errors to separate files

STDIN  = 0 Keyboard input 
STDOUT = 1 Text output 
STDERR = 2 Error text output 
UNDEFINED = 3-9

 command 2> filename       Redirect any error message into a file   
 command 2>> filename      Append any error message into a file  
(command)2> filename       Redirect any CMD.exe error into a file   
 command > file 2>&1       Redirect errors and output to one file       
 command > fileA 2> fileB  Redirect output and errors to separate files

_source

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Further Resources

• Redirection