How to save the output of a console application

Question

I need advice on how to have my C# console application display text to the user through the standard output while still being able access it later on. The actual feature I would like to implement is to dump the entire output buffer to a text file at the end of program execution.

The workaround I use while I don't find a cleaner approach is to subclass TextWriter overriding the writing methods so they would both write to a file and call the original stdout writer. Something like this:

public class DirtyWorkaround {
  private class DirtyWriter : TextWriter {
    private TextWriter stdoutWriter;
    private StreamWriter fileWriter;

    public DirtyWriter(string path, TextWriter stdoutWriter) {
      this.stdoutWriter = stdoutWriter;
      this.fileWriter = new StreamWriter(path);
    }

    override public void Write(string s) {
      stdoutWriter.Write(s);

      fileWriter.Write(s);
      fileWriter.Flush();
    }

    // Same as above for WriteLine() and WriteLine(string),
    // plus whatever methods I need to override to inherit
    // from TextWriter (Encoding.Get I guess).
  }

  public static void Main(string[] args) {
    using (DirtyWriter dw = new DirtyWriter("path", Console.Out)) {
      Console.SetOut(dw);

      // Teh codez
    }
  }
}

See that it writes to and flushes the file all the time. I'd love to do it only at the end of the execution, but I couldn't find any way to access to the output buffer.

Also, excuse inaccuracies with the above code (had to write it ad hoc, sorry ;).

Answer 1

The perfect solution for this is to use log4net with a console appender and a file appender. There are many other appenders available as well. It also allows you to turn the different appenders off and on at runtime.