from (http://www.eclipsezone.com/eclipse/forums/t52910.html)
If someone would like to see the strings written to System.out/System.err by an already deployed plugin in Eclipse, then it can be done by running eclipse in debug mode from command prompt as eclipse.exe -debug.
Or else you can hack a lil bit to capture the stderr/stdout of jvm (running the eclipse) as described in http://www.eclipsezone.com/eclipse/forums/t53216.html
If you run Eclipse in debug mode, you should be able to start it from a command line and include a stderr redirect. In Unix it would be "command 2> file".
This thread has some related content: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/593724/redirect-stderr-stdout-of-a-process-after-its-been-started-using-command-line
This link is more DOS/Windows specific: http://www.teaser.fr/~amajorel/stderr/
The DOS shell, command.com, offers no
mean to redirect stderr. Because of
that, it's impossible to save to a
file, or pipe into a program, the
messages that a program prints to
stderr. "foo >out" only redirects
stdout of foo, not stderr. The latter
still goes to the console.
Since stderr is typically where
important error messages are printed,
this is extremely unfortunate, as this
makes us unable to detect errors in
unattended jobs.
So what do you do ? One solution is to
switch to Unix, where the shell allows
one to redirect stderr. With sh and
its derivatives, use
foo >out 2>&1
to save both stdout and stderr of foo
to out. Similarly, use
foo 2>&1 | bar
to pipe both stdout and stderr of foo
into bar. If you're stuck with DOS,
Stderr is what you need.
Stderr runs a command and merges its
stderr into its stdout. Therefore,
redirecting or piping stdout is
equivalent to doing the same thing to
stderr as well.
I'll have to keep looking for Windows solutions. PowerShell has become popular, it might be worth checking out.