How to output to the console in C Windows

Question

When using iostream in C   on Linux  it displays the program output in the terminal  but in Windows  it just saves the output to a stdout txt file  How can I  in Windows  make the output appear in the console

User · Answer

You don t necessarily need to make any changes to your code  nor to change the SUBSYSTEM type    If you wish  you also could simply pipe stdout and stderr to a console application  a Windows version of cat works well

User · Answer

For debugging in Visual Studio you can print to the debug console   OutputDebugStringW L My output string

User · Answer

If you re using Visual Studio you need to modify the project property  Configuration Properties -  Linker -  System -  SubSystem   This should be set to  Console   SUBSYSTEM CONSOLE   Also you should change your WinMain to be this signature   int main int argc  char   argv                  return 0

User · Answer

Your application must be compiled as a Windows console application

User · Answer

I assume you re using some version of Visual Studio  In windows  std  cout  lt  lt   something   should write something to a console window IF your program is setup in the project settings as a console program

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If you re using Visual Studio  it should work just fine   Here s a code example    include  lt iostream gt   using namespace std   int main  int        cout  lt  lt   This will print to the console    lt  lt  endl      Make sure you chose a Win32 console application when creating a new project  Still you can redirect the output of your project to a file by using the console switch       This will actually redirect the console pipe away from the stdout to your file   for example  myprog exe  gt  gt  myfile txt    I wish I m not mistaken

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If using MinGW  add an option  -Wl subsystem console or -mconsole

User · Answer

First off  what compiler or dev environment are you using  If Visual Studio  you need to make a console application project to get console output   Second   std  cout  lt  lt   quot Hello World quot   lt  lt  std  endl   should work in any C   console application

User · Answer

If you have a none-console Windows application  you can create a console with the AllocConsole function  Once created  you can write to it using the normal std  cout methods

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The AllocConsole Windows API function will create a console window for your application

User · Answer

Since you mentioned stdout txt I google d it to see what exactly would create a stdout txt  normally  even with a Windows app  console output goes to the allocated console  or nowhere if one is not allocated   So  assuming you are using SDL  which is the only thing that brought up stdout txt   you should follow the advice here  Either freopen stdout and stderr with  CON   or do the other linker compile workarounds there   In case the link gets broken again  here is exactly what was referenced from libSDL       How do I avoid creating stdout txt and stderr txt        I believe inside the Visual C   project that comes with SDL there is a SDL nostdio target    you can build which does what you want TM          If you define  NO STDIO REDIRECT  and recompile SDL  I think it will fix the problem          Answer courtesy of Bill Kendrick

User · Answer

Whether to use subsystem console or subsystem windows kind of depends on whether how you want to start your application    If you use subsystem console  then you get all of the stdout written to the terminal  The trouble is that if you start the application from the Start Menu Desktop  you  by default  get a console appearing as well as the application window  which can look pretty ugly   If you use subsystem windows  you won t get stdout stderr even if you run the application from a DOS window  Cygwin  or other terminal    If you want the middle way which is to output to the terminal IF the application was started in a terminal  then follow the link that Luke provided in his solution  http   dslweb nwnexus com  ast dload guicon htm   For reference  I ran into this problem with an application that I want to run in either normal Windows mode or batch mode  that is  as part of a script  depending on command-line switches  The whole differentiation between console and Windows applications is a bit bizarre to Unix folks

User · Answer

There is a good solution  if  AllocConsole      0           Handle error here  Use   GetLastError   to get the error        Redirect CRT standard input  output and error handles to the console window  FILE   pNewStdout   nullptr  FILE   pNewStderr   nullptr  FILE   pNewStdin   nullptr     freopen s  amp pNewStdout   CONOUT     w   stdout     freopen s  amp pNewStderr   CONOUT     w   stderr     freopen s  amp pNewStdin   CONIN     r   stdin       Clear the error state for all of the C   standard streams  Attempting to accessing the streams before they refer    to a valid target causes the stream to enter an error state  Clearing the error state will fix this problem     which seems to occur in newer version of Visual Studio even when the console has not been read from or written    to yet  std  cout clear    std  cerr clear    std  cin clear     std  wcout clear    std  wcerr clear    std  wcin clear

[c++] How to output to the console in C++/Windows

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