Capturing output from WshShell.Exec using Windows Script Host

Question

I wrote the following two functions, and call the second ("callAndWait") from JavaScript running inside Windows Script Host. My overall intent is to call one command line program from another. That is, I'm running the initial scripting using cscript, and then trying to run something else (Ant) from that script.

function readAllFromAny(oExec)
{
     if (!oExec.StdOut.AtEndOfStream)
          return oExec.StdOut.ReadLine();

     if (!oExec.StdErr.AtEndOfStream)
          return "STDERR: " + oExec.StdErr.ReadLine();

     return -1;
}

// Execute a command line function....
function callAndWait(execStr) {
 var oExec = WshShell.Exec(execStr);
  while (oExec.Status == 0)
 {
  WScript.Sleep(100);
  var output;
  while ( (output = readAllFromAny(oExec)) != -1) {
   WScript.StdOut.WriteLine(output);
  }
 }

}

Unfortunately, when I run my program, I don't get immediate feedback about what the called program is doing. Instead, the output seems to come in fits and starts, sometimes waiting until the original program has finished, and sometimes it appears to have deadlocked. What I really want to do is have the spawned process actually share the same StdOut as the calling process, but I don't see a way to do that. Just setting oExec.StdOut = WScript.StdOut doesn't work.

Is there an alternate way to spawn processes that will share the StdOut & StdErr of the launching process? I tried using "WshShell.Run(), but that gives me a "permission denied" error. That's problematic, because I don't want to have to tell my clients to change how their Windows environment is configured just to run my program.

What can I do?

Answer 1

Yes, the Exec function seems to be broken when it comes to terminal output.

I have been using a similar function function ConsumeStd(e) {WScript.StdOut.Write(e.StdOut.ReadAll());WScript.StdErr.Write(e.StdErr.ReadAll());} that I call in a loop similar to yours. Not sure if checking for EOF and reading line by line is better or worse.