Application of the Day

For years capturing stdout in Windows has been a pain in the you know what.  Options I used were as follows:

• Redirect output (>) and stderr 2> to a file but this does not capture all of stdout
• What I have done for years is use use cygwin  and/or unxutils so you can leverage unix commands like script and tee
• Increase the buffer size in the cmd window to 9999 lines, run your command, select all and paste to notepad

Note:  the best option by far is to install cygwin and abandon the MS cmd shell altogether but when you work on other peoples systems (e.g. – customer) installing cygwin is not always an option or the best option from an efficiency perspective.

All of the above options seem like a lot of work for what should be base OS functionality.  Well Microshaft finally realized it as a missing component of the OS and incorporated the “clip” command into Windows Vista and newer.  Now any command line command can be piped to “clip” (|clip) and the output will be in the clipboard, it is about time.

Type “clip /?” and hit {enter} and the command syntax will be display as shown below.

CLIP

Description:
    Redirects output of command line tools to the Windows clipboard.
    This text output can then be pasted into other programs.

Parameter List:
    /?                  Displays this help message.

Examples:
    DIR | CLIP          Places a copy of the current directory listing into the Windows clipboard.

    CLIP < README.TXT   Places a copy of the text from readme.txt on to the Windows clipboard.

I use Evernote for all a my not taking needs.  I prefer Evernote over OneNote because I use a number of different computers and I like the ability to easily sync my notebooks, access them via the web and my blackberry.  One issue that I have is when I copy and paste from the web, outlook, word, etc… Evernote does not do a great job with the formatting.  Problem solved, I now use PureText to paste content in plain text.  This allows me to format however I like.  Simple to use, just unzip, start the executable and Ctrl-C to copy and Win-V to paste plain text.  Great little app!