I've had a look at various tips (ss64.com Command Redirection) and tricks but couldn't find an answer to my question:

Question

Is it possible to pipe the command I am going to execute into the same redirected output I will be creating?

Example with netstat

Input command

C:Usersmemyselfandi> netstat -obna >C:tempnetstat_with_programs.txt

The actual command would be: netstat -obna >C:tempnetstat_with_programs.txt

Output (The text file netstat_with_programs.txt)

This is the actual content of the netstat_with_programs.txt file. (The command is basically documenting itself in the output file.)

netstat -obna >C:tempnetstat_with_programs.txt

Active connections



  Proto  Local Address          Remoteaddress          State             PID

  TCP    0.0.0.0:135            0.0.0.0:0              LISTENING         888

  RpcSs

 [svchost.exe]

  TCP    0.0.0.0:2382           0.0.0.0:0              LISTENING         1396

 [sqlbrowser.exe]

  TCP    0.0.0.0:3389           0.0.0.0:0              LISTENING         376

  TermService

 [svchost.exe]

....

Example with arp

Input command

C:usersmemyselfandi> arp -a >C:temparp_output.txt

The actual command is: arp -a >C:temparp_output.txt

Output (The contents of arp_output.txt)

This is the actual content of the arp_output.txt file. (The command is basically documenting itself in the output file.)

arp -a >C:temparp_output.txt

Interface: 10.57.209.191 --- 0x5

  Internet Address      Physical Address      Type

  10.57.209.2           80-e0-1d-58-8a-50     dynamic 

  10.57.209.3           80-e0-1d-58-8b-88     dynamic 

  10.57.209.9           00-50-56-8d-91-fe     dynamic 

  10.57.209.10          00-50-56-8d-91-fe     dynamic 

  10.57.209.175         00-50-56-b5-44-16     dynamic 

  10.57.209.255         ff-ff-ff-ff-ff-ff     static  

  224.0.0.22            01-00-5e-00-00-16     static  

  224.0.0.252           01-00-5e-00-00-fc     static  

  230.0.0.1             01-00-5e-00-00-01     static  

  239.255.255.250       01-00-5e-7f-ff-fa     static  

So basically I would be documenting the command I am executing in the output I am creating.

Based on the possible solutions provided by @barlop in the comments, I went ahead and executed both commands:

With ECHO

echo netstat -obna >C:tempnetstat_with_programs.txt && netstat -obna >>C:tempnetstat_with_programs.txt

...this produced the following first line in the output file, which doesn't fully satisfy the requirements:

netstat -obna  

....

With %aaa% variable

set aaa=netstat -obna

echo (%aaa%>C:tempnetstat_with_programs.txt) && (echo %aaa%|cmd)>>C:tempnetstat_with_programs.txt

...this produces the same output, which doesn't fully meet the requirements:

netstat -obna  

...

This is impossible because the shell, which takes the command and executes it, has no idea of what the arguments do that it is passing to the command.

For example in our theoretical rot13write C:foobar.txt, is P:sbbone.gkg

rot13write -qevir "P" -svyr "sbbone" rkg ".gkg"

That may tell rot13write to write to the drive P, the file foobar, and the extension txt. Or it may all be a joke and that path could have already been hard coded into the executable. You don't know, and neither does a shell.

So the shell can not echo to the file that a program is mysteriously writing to, because the shell doesn't know of that sufficiently; and, the program which does know how it is invoked is under no obligation to do anything with that data (like print the invocation command to the file it's outputting to). What you can do is

1. Have the shell echo all its commands. Most shells support this.


2. Have the program that you execute write to standard output (as it normally does) which the program will inherit from the shell that spawned it (this is how programs you call and the shell write to the same place -- the psuedo terminal)


3. Redirect the shells standard output to destination file.

This will do everything you want except show the flag and output location in the command.

This looks like this in command prompt (I think)

cmd /c "netstat" > myOutput.txt | type myOutput.txt

And it looks like this in PowerShell,

powershell -command "Set-PSDebug -Trace 1; netstat" | tee myOutput.txt

If the problem is to display (or redirect to a file) the redirection symbol (>) with the ECHO command, then you just need to escape it. The escape symbol in this case would be ^:

ECHO netstat -obna ^>C:tempnetstat_with_programs.txt >C:tempnetstat_with_programs.txt

netstat -obna >>C:tempnetstat_with_programs.txt

The second command in the above snippet is using >> instead of > because you want to add the output to the same file rather than to overwrite it.