Is there a way to catch the stderr and stdout in Visual Studio?

Question

Is there a way to catch the stdout and stderr in Visual Studio? For example, when I use

cout <<"Hello world!"<< endl;

A black window appears and disappears. It's so fast that I can't see it. There is a output section in the IDE but it only allow me to choose display output from build and something else but without the choice of stdout.

A cheating solution maybe calling

system("pause");

but it doesn't sound right. I searched in the option but I can't find an item.

Anyone has any idea? Thanks. I just start to use VS and I'm on Linux before.

Answer 1

Rather than using the "Start Debugging" command, if you want to check the output, use "Start Without Debugging". That's generally how I handle it. The command prompt window will remain up until you close it. If there's a crash or something, you can always reattach Visual Studio to the process, or just run it with "Start Debugging".

Answer 2

Go to Project Properties -> Linker -> System -> Change subsystem to Console.

Answer 3

Without actually trying to redirect stdin/err streams, there are some alternatives you can try:

• Open a command prompt window and cd to the directory your executable will be created in then run it from there.
• Perhaps try using something like std::cin.get(); or std::cin.ignore(std::cin.rdbuf()->in_avail() + 1); instead of system("pause").
• Display output in the visual studio debugger via OutputDebugString