How to redirect the output back to the screen after freopen("out.txt", "a", stdout)

Question

#include <stdio.h>

int main() {
    printf("This goes to screen\n");
    freopen("out.txt", "a", stdout);
    printf("This goes to out.txt");
    freopen("/dev/stdout", "a", stdout);
    printf("This should go to screen too, but doesn't\n");

    return 0;
}

I call freopen to redirect the stdout to out.txt then I print something on the file, now I want to redirect it back to the screen, but freopen("/dev/stdout", "a", stdout); doesn't work. Is there any way to do that using ANSI C or POSIX system calls?

Answer 1

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a good way:

http://c-faq.com/stdio/undofreopen.html

The best recommendation is not to use freopen in this circumstance.

Answer 2

I can't think of a way to do this in a cross-platform manner, but on GNU/Linux systems (and maybe other POSIX-compliant ones, too) you can freopen ("/dev/tty", "a", stdout). Is this what you were trying to do?

Answer 3

Generally speaking, you can't. You have closed the file, which could've been pipe or whatever. It's not reopenable. You might have saved stdout value, then assign some fopen to it and then close it and copy the old value back. Example:

FILE *o = stdout;
stdout=fopen("/tmp/crap.txt","a");
printf("Oh no!\n");
fclose(stdout);
stdout = o;

Mike Weller suggested below in comments that stdout might not always be writable. In this case something like that might help:

int o = dup(fileno(stdout));
freopen("/tmp/crap.txt","a",stdout);
printf("Oh no!\n");
dup2(o,fileno(stdout));
close(o);

Another edit: if you're using it to redirect output from the child process like your comment elsewhere suggest, you can redirect it after the fork.

Answer 4

Use fdopen() and dup() as well as freopen().

int old_stdout = dup(1);  // Preserve original file descriptor for stdout.

FILE *fp1 = freopen("out.txt", "w", stdout);  // Open new stdout

...write to stdout...   // Use new stdout

FILE *fp2 = fdopen(old_stdout, "w");   // Open old stdout as a stream

...Now, how to get stdout to refer to fp2?
...Under glibc, I believe you can use:

fclose(stdout);    // Equivalent to fclose(fp1);
stdout = fp2;      // Assign fp2 to stdout
// *stdout = *fp2;   // Works on Solaris and MacOS X, might work elsewhere.

close(old_stdout);   // Close the file descriptor so pipes work sanely

I'm not sure whether you can do the assignment reliably elsewhere.

Dubious code that does actually work

The code below worked on Solaris 10 and MacOS X 10.6.2 - but I'm not confident that it is reliable. The structure assignment may or may not work with Linux glibc.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <unistd.h>

int main(void)
{
    printf("This goes to screen\n");
    int old_stdout = dup(1);  // Consider dup(STDOUT_FILENO) or dup(fileno(stdout))
    FILE *fp1 = freopen("out.txt", "a", stdout);
    printf("This goes to out.txt\n");
    fclose(stdout);
    FILE *fp2 = fdopen(old_stdout, "w");
    *stdout = *fp2;                       // Unreliable!
    printf("This should go to screen too, but doesn't\n");

    return 0;
}

You can't say you weren't warned — this is playing with fire!

If you're on a system with the /dev/fd file system, you could create the name of the file implied by the file descriptor returned from dup() with sprintf(buffer, "/dev/fd/%d", old_stdout) and then use freopen() with that name. This would be a lot more reliable than the assignment used in this code.

The better solutions either make the code use 'fprintf(fp, ...)' everywhere, or use a cover function that allows you set your own default file pointer:

mprintf.c

#include "mprintf.h"
#include <stdarg.h>

static FILE *default_fp = 0;

void set_default_stream(FILE *fp)
{
    default_fp = fp;
}

int mprintf(const char *fmt, ...)
{
    va_list args;
    va_start(args, fmt);

    if (default_fp == 0)
        default_fp = stdout;

    int rv = vfprintf(default_fp, fmt, args);

    va_end(args);
    return(rv);
 }

mprintf.h

#ifndef MPRINTF_H_INCLUDED
#define MPRINTF_H_INCLUDED

#include <stdio.h>

extern void set_default_stream(FILE *fp);
extern int  mprintf(const char *fmt, ...);

#endif

Clearly, you can create an mvprintf() and other functions as needed.

Example use of mprintf()

Then, in place of the original code, you can use:

#include "mprintf.h"

int main()
{
    mprintf("This goes to screen\n");
    FILE *fp1 = fopen("out.txt", "w");
    set_default_stream(fp1);
    mprintf("This goes to out.txt\n");
    fclose(fp1);
    set_default_stream(stdout);
    mprintf("This should go to screen too, but doesn't\n");

    return 0;
}

(Warning: untested code - confidence level too high. Also, all code written assuming you use a C99 compiler, primarily because I declare variables when I first need them, not at the beginning of the function.)

---

Caution:

Note that if the original program is invoked as ./original_program > file or ./original_program | grep something (with redirected output) or is run from a cron job, then opening /dev/tty is not usually appropriate as a way to reopen standard output because the original standard output was not the terminal.

Also, note that if the redirection of standard output is used prior to forking and execing a child program and the original standard output is reinstated in the parent, then the sequence of operations is wrong. You should fork and then adjust the I/O of the child (only), without modifying the parent's I/O at all.

Answer 5

On Windows, you can open "CONOUT$".

freopen("test.txt", "w", stdout);
printf("this goes to test.txt");
freopen("CONOUT$", "w", stdout);
printf("this goes to the console\n");

This probably doesn't work if stdout is redirected to start with.

Answer 6

The following code (SwapIOB) is used in Testbenches that want to store the stdout stream for comparison to an expected results file.

Background: File streams are managed using an _IOB structure that is stored in an array of 20 _IOB entries. This includes stdout stream. The IOBs are stored in an array. When a file is created the application code gets a ptr to an element in that array. The application code then passes that ptr to the OS for processing I/O calls. Thus, the OS does NOT itself contain or rely on its own pointers to the application's IOB.

Requirement: When running a testbench the stdout messages issued by an application should be re-directed to a file. However, after the module under test has completed then stdout messages should be re-redirected to the console.

This routine was tested and is currently used on Windows XP/Pro system.

void SwapIOB(FILE *A, FILE *B) {

    FILE temp;

    // make a copy of IOB A (usually this is "stdout")
    memcpy(&temp, A, sizeof(struct _iobuf));

    // copy IOB B to A's location, now any output
    // sent to A is redirected thru B's IOB.
    memcpy(A, B, sizeof(struct _iobuf));

    // copy A into B, the swap is complete
    memcpy(B, &temp, sizeof(struct _iobuf));

}  // end SwapIOB;

Application code uses SwapIOB() similar to:

FILE *fp;

fp = fopen("X", "w");

SwapIOB(stdout, fp);

printf("text to file X");

SwapIOB(stdout, fp);

fclose(fp);

printf("text to console works, again!");