Programmatically Ignore Cout

Question

Does anybody know if there is a trick to toggle all the cout << functions to not print out visible output? I am trying to hack together some code written

Answer 1

Why precisely do you not want to redirect the output? If it is because there is other output you wish to keep, you may be out of luck.

If it is just so you don't have to type a complex shell expression on a terminal in a demo, I suggest making a start script and doing the redirect inside.

That, or reopen stdout to /dev/null somewhere near the top of main.

Answer 2

You can change cout's stream buffer.

streambuf *old = cout.rdbuf();
cout.rdbuf(0);
cout << "Hidden text!\n";
cout.rdbuf(old);
cout << "Visible text!\n";

Edit:

Thanks to John Flatness' comment you can shorten the code a bit:

streambuf *old = cout.rdbuf(0);
cout << "Hidden text!\n";
cout.rdbuf(old);
cout << "Visible text!\n";