Hybrid GUI/Console App

[Thibault Genessay]

Hi Guys

>  ::AttachConsole(ATTACH_PARENT_PROCESS) could help here but this function
>  fails for me (Windows 2003) with "invalid handle" error and, anyhow, it's
>  XP and later only. And in fact even allocating a new console doesn't work
>  (the console does appear but printf() still does nothing).
>
>   So it unfortunately seems that the usefulness of this method under Windows
>  is indeed limited to console applications which sometimes need to show GUI.

Attached is a bunch of code that creates a console for a process that
was linked with the /SUBSYSTEM:WINDOWS. I use it on Win XP and it
works as expected. Not so broken, after all.

Regards

Thibault


void allocateConsole()
{
	int hConHandle;

	HANDLE stdHandle;

	CONSOLE_SCREEN_BUFFER_INFO coninfo;

	FILE *fp;

	// allocate a console for this app
	AllocConsole();

	// set the screen buffer to be big enough to let us scroll text
	GetConsoleScreenBufferInfo(GetStdHandle(STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE),
		&coninfo);
	coninfo.dwSize.Y = 300;
	SetConsoleScreenBufferSize(GetStdHandle(STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE),
		coninfo.dwSize);


	// redirect unbuffered STDOUT to the console
	stdHandle = GetStdHandle(STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE);
	hConHandle = _open_osfhandle((intptr_t)stdHandle, _O_TEXT);
	fp = _fdopen( hConHandle, "w" );
	*stdout = *fp;
	setvbuf( stdout, NULL, _IONBF, 0 );


	// redirect unbuffered STDIN to the console
	stdHandle = GetStdHandle(STD_INPUT_HANDLE);
	hConHandle = _open_osfhandle((intptr_t)stdHandle, _O_TEXT);
	fp = _fdopen( hConHandle, "r" );
	*stdin = *fp;
	setvbuf( stdin, NULL, _IONBF, 0 );

	// redirect unbuffered STDERR to the console
	stdHandle = GetStdHandle(STD_ERROR_HANDLE);
	hConHandle = _open_osfhandle((intptr_t)stdHandle, _O_TEXT);
	fp = _fdopen( hConHandle, "w" );
	*stderr = *fp;
	setvbuf( stderr, NULL, _IONBF, 0 );

	// make cout, wcout, cin, wcin, wcerr, cerr, wclog and clog
	// point to console as well

	std::ios::sync_with_stdio();
}