Running Dos commands from VB

[kenfranklin]

It seems as if this should be easy but I'm having no luck so far...

My company has a number of dos-based utilities which I would like to invoke in a VB(6) program, then redirect the output to a text file. I keep getting 'file not found' even though I have the correct path. To make sure our utilites weren't causing the problem, I tried the following lines, which also resulted in a 'file not found' error:

DosLine = "dir > d:\vbtest.tmp"
Holder = Shell(DosLine, vbMaximizedFocus)

It doesn't matter if vbtest.tmp already exists or not. Does anyone know a way to resolve this problem?

Ken Franklin
[email protected]

[_eclipsed_]

Ken-
I've been looking into the same problem. I'm assuming that the redirection is giving you the problem. The solution that I came up with is to create or write to a batch file. They understand the redirection. So for example you could do this:

Dim sCmds As String
sCmds = "dir > d:\vbtest.tmp"  
Open "c:\Dosline.bat" for Output as #1
Print#1,sCmds
Close#1

Then use the Shell() function to execute the .bat file

[kenfranklin]

That worked (Thanks, this project has been bugging me) but seems pretty clumsy.

Does anyone know more about why redirecting doesn't work at a Dos prompt without writing a batch file? Is there a better way to get results from Dos prompts?