VB.NET - Read lines from command line to Windows form possible?

Question

Hey Overflow, I have an application which serves as a user interface for a spartan/command line program.

I have the program running on a separate process, and my application monitors it to see if it is responding and how mush CPU it is utilising.

Now I have a list of files in my program (listbox) which are to be sent to the application, which happens fine. But I want to be able to read text from the com-line so as to determine when the first file has been processed.

Com-line says one of "selecting settings", "unsupported format" and "cannot be fixed". What I want to be able to do is when it says one of these three things, remove item(0) in listbox1.

Is this possible?

I thought of programming an event which handles com_exe.print or something or other, if possible.

Answer 1

You might be able to do what you want using the AttachConsole API function as described here. However, maybe an easier alternative would be if you could pipe the output of the command line app to a text file and then your app could just parse the text file (assuming that the command line file wouldn't lock the file completely, I'm not sure about that).

If you don't know how to pipe the output, this page has quite a bit of information.

Answer 2

Read the standard output from the process. MSDN Article

Theres an example of synchronous reading from the process in that article.