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Desperate help trying to get headless dosbox to run a command

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First post, by Hunter

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Hey folks!
I've spent a lot of hours trying to run a headless program on a remote host under Linux using 0.74, since the program can only be executed using DOS.
Luckily enough, dosbox works like a charm in what respects to the emulation, but I hit a bug that prevents me to from pulling any kind of output from the program using program redirection to a file due to this Unable to redirect Dosbox output to a file

Unfortunately no older version seems to work either for me, I just can't get any kind of file redirection at all, I just get a

SHELL:Redirect output to MYFILE.out

But the file is written with 0 bytes size, no matter what I do. 😢 😢 😢 😢 😢 😢 😢

I see there are at least a way to record the screen or something like that, but it involves interactively pressing some keys I'm not able to do, since, again, this is intended to be run on a remote host using a headless dosbox execution.

Do I have any possibility at all (I mean, really at this point I'm really very desperate) of capturing the output in any possible way at all that you can think of?

Lots of thanks in advance!

Hunt

Reply 1 of 2, by Jorpho

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I was thinking of something else in that thread, I think. This isn't really a "bug"; it's the way DOSBox was written.

Probably the easiest way to do what you suggest would be to redirect the output of whatever you are running in DOSBox to a file within DOSBox, and then read the file. Like, if you are running "foo.exe" in DOSBox, then you will need to instead run "foo.exe > myfile.out".

I'm not sure if "piping" works in standard DOSBox, though. You might need to be running the 4DOS.com command shell.

Reply 2 of 2, by Kerr Avon

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Slightly off-topic, but I've just learned a new phrase! I didn't know what 'Headless' means in a computer program sense, so I had to look it up, and for anyone else who doesn't know, it means a program that doesn't have any sort of front-end (menu) system, so you need to provide the program parameters in the command line entry, or a configuration files.

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