Sending cout to a log file.

[anotherghost]

Hi,

I have been trying to figure out how to write all of my cout to a txt file, so that I can look at it later outside of the terminal.

I can easily do this with an ofstream but I don't know how to "redirect" cout so that it also writes it to a log file.

I need something like

void myprogram(){

  // Some line here to make this work

  cout << "Hi \n";

}

to yield an output file containing the word hi.

[Tresky]

You are going to have to use an ofstream as far as I know. Not that much work. To make it easier on yourself just make a function that takes a std::string as a parameter and prints it to the file. You can then just call the function instead of writing an output statement.

[andywestken]

Wrapping the ostream object will prevent you from using some of its properties. The insertion operator (<<) should really be used directly to write the string to the stream.

But you could modify the function myprogram() to take an ostream.

void myprogram(ostream& os){

  os << "Hi" << endl; // use endl to end lines, rather than just "\n"

}

Then you can call the function with cout or a file

#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>

void myprogram(ostream& os); // forward definition

int main()
{
    // write to cout
    myprogram(cout);

    // and now to the file example.txt
    ofstream ofs("example.txt");
    if(ofs.is_open())
    {
        myprogram(ofs);
    }

    return 0;
}

// myprogram function goes here 

[anotherghost]

@andywestken: That worked perfectly. I didn't think to pass the ostream by reference. Thanks a lot.