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From: rose@shorty.CS.WISC.EDU (Scott Rose)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: MS-DOS puzzle #1
Message-ID: <7439@spool.cs.wisc.edu>
Date: 23 Apr 89 01:14:44 GMT
References: <6893@bsu-cs.bsu.edu> <238@cbnewsh.ATT.COM> <LFK.89Apr22114826@mbio.med.upenn.edu>
Sender: news@spool.cs.wisc.edu
Reply-To: rose@shorty.cs.wisc.edu (Scott Rose)
Organization: U of Wisconsin CS Dept
Lines: 13

The lack of redirectability of standard error is indeed an unfortunate
feature of command.com.  For those times when it is desirable to perform
this redirection, Microsoft provides the "errout" command.  It comes with
MSC 5.x.  

It is fairly trival to write your own version of this command, by
the by, by making use of the spawn() and dup2() library functions or the
underlying MSDOS services.  Simply use dup2() to connect standard error
to standard output before spawning argv[1], with argv[2]...argv[argc-1]
as the argument vector.  This gives your executed program a little bit
less memory than it would have if you ran it right from the primary command
processor, but that's the only significant downside.  Keep the name of the 
new command short and you won't sacrifice much command line length.