I want to create a generic logging application (Windows), which shall be able to execute an arbitrary executable as a child process and log the complete standard streams of a specific to a file (stdin, stdout, stderr).
Further, this logging application shall be acting like a kind of a "Man-in-the-Middle" application completely transparent, so that for user who is calling either the original executable or the wrapper logging application, there is not difference.
This functionality is somehow similar to the UNIX command line tool "tee", but as far as I found out, this tool is unfortunately not be able to log also the stdin (only stdout and stderr are supported). In addition, I want to log some more information e.g. who was the calling parent process, timestamps...
I want to use this especially for the command prompt: "cmd.exe" and rename the original and replace it with my own "cmd.exe" to automatically get a history file of all entered (stdin) commands, with its outputs (stdout, stderr).
Does someone have a good idea how to get this easily realized, perhaps with C# and pipes?
Best Regards, Andreas
A simple version would indeed use pipes. In a native win32 app you would create some inheritable pipes and set them and the STARTF_USESTDHANDLES flag in the STARTUPINFO struct passed to CreateProcess. There is example code for this on MSDN.
You cannot however use this to replace cmd.exe because cmd.exe also uses the special Windows console API in interactive mode to implement features like the F7 history "dialog". You could take a look at some of the free terminal replacements like Console2 to see how they do it.