Hello:

I have a little watchdog utility for windows that runs each five minutes, like a unix cron ("Tareas programadas" in Spanish, scheduled tasks?). It opened a console window for a second and that was very annoying. So I used the switch -GW and there is no more flashing console bothering. But then I can't show any help or any output for debug from the prompt.

I can live with it, in fact, it usually uses a log file, but some times, when I'm installing, testing paramters etc, it's more handy to run the program from the prompt and see the result immediately or display the help instead of having to open logs.

Is there any way to open a console on the fly and send the output to the console?

FPC 3.0.0 for Windows 7 and Windows XP

Hello,

I would create a .bat file in temp folder and run a new shell execute of that .bat. This .bat simply display some echo lines and finally autokill itself.

If your system for security reasons do not allow run bats then you can create a .txt file and launch a shell execute cmd with "type \path\file.txt" (keeping session open or it will clear the screen). You main program can wait 2-5 seconds and delete the .txt file to not pollute the temp folder.

Of course this is a "home made" solution :) Another is have a different exe just for the help, have a .bat or .txt in your app folder just to show the help if it is always the same, ...

I have found a solution here:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20134421/can-a-windows-gui-program-written-in-lazarus-create-a-console-and-write-to-it-at

At least it works for windows

uses
  Windows;
begin
  AllocConsole;      // in Windows unit
  IsConsole := True; // in System unit
  SysInitStdIO;      // in System unit
  // Now you can do Writeln, DebugLn, ...
end.

This is very useful to show whats going on in a Windows application when is processing in background, thanks.

Regards,
Marcos Douglas