How to spawn a process and capture its STDOUT in .NET? [duplicate]

I need to spawn a child process that is a console application, and capture its output.

I wrote up the following code for a method:

string retMessage = String.Empty;
ProcessStartInfo startInfo = new ProcessStartInfo();
Process p = new Process();

startInfo.CreateNoWindow = true;
startInfo.RedirectStandardOutput = true;
startInfo.RedirectStandardInput = true;

startInfo.UseShellExecute = false;
startInfo.Arguments = command;
startInfo.FileName = exec;

p.StartInfo = startInfo;
p.Start();

p.OutputDataReceived += new DataReceivedEventHandler
(
    delegate(object sender, DataReceivedEventArgs e)
    {
        using (StreamReader output = p.StandardOutput)
        {
            retMessage = output.ReadToEnd();
        }
    }
);

p.WaitForExit();

return retMessage;

However, this does not return anything. I don't believe the OutputDataReceived event is being called back, or the WaitForExit() command may be blocking the thread so it will never callback.

Any advice?

EDIT: Looks like I was trying too hard with the callback. Doing:

return p.StandardOutput.ReadToEnd(); 

Appears to work fine.

Solution 1:

Here's code that I've verified to work. I use it for spawning MSBuild and listening to its output:

process.StartInfo.UseShellExecute = false;
process.StartInfo.RedirectStandardOutput = true;
process.OutputDataReceived += (sender, args) => Console.WriteLine("received output: {0}", args.Data);
process.Start();
process.BeginOutputReadLine();

Solution 2:

I just tried this very thing and the following worked for me:

StringBuilder outputBuilder;
ProcessStartInfo processStartInfo;
Process process;

outputBuilder = new StringBuilder();

processStartInfo = new ProcessStartInfo();
processStartInfo.CreateNoWindow = true;
processStartInfo.RedirectStandardOutput = true;
processStartInfo.RedirectStandardInput = true;
processStartInfo.UseShellExecute = false;
processStartInfo.Arguments = "<insert command line arguments here>";
processStartInfo.FileName = "<insert tool path here>";

process = new Process();
process.StartInfo = processStartInfo;
// enable raising events because Process does not raise events by default
process.EnableRaisingEvents = true;
// attach the event handler for OutputDataReceived before starting the process
process.OutputDataReceived += new DataReceivedEventHandler
(
    delegate(object sender, DataReceivedEventArgs e)
    {
        // append the new data to the data already read-in
        outputBuilder.Append(e.Data);
    }
);
// start the process
// then begin asynchronously reading the output
// then wait for the process to exit
// then cancel asynchronously reading the output
process.Start();
process.BeginOutputReadLine();
process.WaitForExit();
process.CancelOutputRead();

// use the output
string output = outputBuilder.ToString();

Solution 3:

Here's some full and simple code to do this. This worked fine when I used it.

var processStartInfo = new ProcessStartInfo
{
    FileName = @"C:\SomeProgram",
    Arguments = "Arguments",
    RedirectStandardOutput = true,
    UseShellExecute = false
};
var process = Process.Start(processStartInfo);
var output = process.StandardOutput.ReadToEnd();
process.WaitForExit();

Note that this only captures standard output; it doesn't capture standard error. If you want both, use this technique for each stream.